Rejected Prequel Titles — Page 6

Quit yer bellyaching, ya lightweight. :P

Akwat Kbrana said:

xhonzi said:

Are you suggesting that Phantom and Menace are both nouns?  Or perhaps it's just poor grammar and the title is meant to be "The Phatom [is] Menace[ing]" or "The Phantom Menace[s]".

Theoretically, they could both be nouns with "menace" standing in simple apposition to "phantom." But that construction is very uncommon in English. More likely, "menace" is the noun and "phantom" is the adjective qualitatively modifying the noun.

As in "The Car House" which is a story about what exacty?

Or "Cat Dog"  nvm.

"The Phantom and The Menace"

"The Phantom (feat. Menace)"

"The Taco Burrito"

"The Phantom.  Menace?"

"The Phantom: Menace"

"PHANTOM: Menace!"

"The Keyboard Mouse"

"The Cup Angel"

etc...

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.

Frink:

Man, I liked grammar corrections back when they were just typo corrections. :p

That's why I misspelled Phatom just for you.

Carp!  I mean, ermm... yes!  exacty.

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").

Gertrude Stein said:

Pink cut pink.

And I noticed I didn't spell construction right.  I gues I was just leaving lots o' little gems for Frink.

Exacty.