Grammar – ‘The Dangerous of’ vs ‘The Danger of’

adjectivesgrammar

Can an adjective be followed by of that regarded as possessive but not the one that is a part of adjective.

  • 1) Do you know the dangerous of smoking cigarettes?

Usually I read always such as this following structure.

  • 2) Do you know the danger of smoking cigarettes?

However, i have noticed such aforementioned sentences (1) in books.

The real text i Read was for Sigmund Freud

Best Answer

“The dangerous of smoking” is unidiomatic to me as a native speaker of American English. While there are some cases where you can use an adjective like a noun, it’s not possible here.

To confirm this, I searched the corpus of contemporary American English for * dangerous of _nn* (where the first asterisk matches any word and the last part matches any noun) and the results I got were all for “the most dangerous of [plural noun]”, which is a different structure that is acceptable.

Sometimes mistakes happen, which is the only explanation I have for the occurrence in the first source. In the case of the second source there are several errors in the small part I read:

  • “let the child knows” (should be “know”)
  • “a Must” (should be lowercase)

To answer your real question, “satisfying” is a gerund (which work the same way as nouns), so it works in the context.

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