Nornagest comments on Bridge Collapse: Reductionism as Engineering Problem - Less Wrong

44 Post author: RobbBB 18 February 2014 10:03PM

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Comment author: komponisto 19 February 2014 08:43:05PM 1 point [-]

Just curious (and not necessarily addressed to you specifically), but what on Earth is wrong with the standard, conventional English notation for this, which is a hyphen? E.g. "Rational-Harry" etc.

Comment author: Nornagest 19 February 2014 09:05:10PM *  3 points [-]

I'm not a linguist, but hyphen-compounding doesn't look quite right to me in this context; you usually see that for disambiguation, in compound participles ("moth-eaten"; "hyphen-compounding"), or to cover a few odd cases like common names derived from phrases ("jack-in-the-pulpit"). I think standard English would be to simply treat the modifier as an adjective ("Rational Harry"; "Girl Blaise"; "Death Eater Ron"); nouns often get coerced into their adjective form here if possible, but it's common to see modifying nouns even if no adjective form exists.

As to why it doesn't get used this way in fan jargon... who knows, but fans do tend to share a (mildly irritating) fondness for unusual lexical and grammatical constructions ("I have lost my ability to can"). Probably just a shibboleth thing.