What kind of property does doesn’t-pass-the-laugh-test have in the expression
which escalates unreliability to the doesn’t-pass-the-laugh-test level
taken from this article? Is it an adjective or a noun?
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1 Answer
Here's the full context:
...he conducted the participant interviews by phone, which escalates unreliability to the doesn’t-pass-the-laugh-test level. By phone, researchers aren’t able to evaluate essential non-verbal cues that might cast doubts on verbal responses. Phone interviews, along with written interviews, carry too much guesswork baggage to be valuable in a scientific study, and Spitzer certainly knew that.
It's called a compound modifier, and in this example, it functions like an adjective. In particular, it modifies the word level.
