xhonzi said:

I think the constuction in English is actually very common, such as the wiki provided example of My Friend John. But I don't think it works with the nouns Phantom and Menace. I stand by "Phantom" being used as adjective (only) to Menace.

I realize this discussion is mostly pointless at this time and it has very little to do with my argument in Post 118... but it's fun.

Well, apposition itself is fairly common in English, but we don't typically put two appositional nouns immediately adjacent to one another without any intervening particles or punctuation markers. Common usage usually involves either a connecting conjunction between the two nouns (ie, "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer"), or offsetting the second noun with commas (ie, "The President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated...). There are exceptions, of course, but as you so aptly pointed out, "phantom" and "menace" don't really work very well appositionally to begin with.

I agree that phantom=adjective and menace=noun makes a lot more sense. It would be very unusual to switch the two, since English typically puts the qualifying adjective before the noun it's modifying (ie, "the pink rose" rather than "the rose pink").