In Praise of the Compound Adjective
February 7th 2020 I have long admired compound adjectives. They can be succinctly functional, as in an "ill-conceived plan" or a "man-eating tiger", or excitingly poetic, as in Yeats’s wonderful line: That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
Some compound adjectives, such as "ill-conceived" and "man-eating", are frequently used and therefore catalogued in the dictionary, but
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