Grammar
Some grammarians believe that the use of the noun "Democrat" as an adjective is ungrammatical. However, the use of a noun as a modifier of another noun is not grammatically incorrect in modern English in the formation of a compound noun, e.g., "shoe store," "school bus," "peace movement," "Senate election," etc. The use of nouns as adjectives is part of a broader linguistic trend, according to language expert Ruth Walker, who claims, "We're losing our inflections—the special endings we use to distinguish between adjectives and nouns, for instance. There's a tendency to modify a noun with another noun rather than an adjective. Some may speak of "the Ukraine election" rather than 'the Ukrainian election' or 'the election in Ukraine,' for instance. It's 'the Iraq war' rather than 'the Iraqi war,' to give another example."
In American history many parties were named by their opponents (Federalists, Loco-Focos, Know Nothings, Populists, Dixiecrats), including the Democrats themselves, as the Federalists in the 1790s used "Democratic Party" as a term of ridicule.
Read more about this topic: Democrat Party (epithet)
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Proverbs, words, and grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision, than the wisest individual.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)