phrases - “Battled-hardened,” Is this one of New Yorker's renowned idiosyncrasies?


There was a really entertaining short story describing customary exchanges of fierce words between a restaurant patron and waitress in New Yorker magazine (June 14.) under the title, “Lunch at Gitlitz’s. However, I was drawn to the word, “battled-hardened nemesis” in the following sentence;



“When we walked into the restaurant, we immediately saw her – my father’s battled-hardened nemesis; a waitress named Irene. She was standing in back by the kitchen, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, one hand on her hip.. She and my father locked eyes like two gunslingers stepping on to a dusty street. “There she blows” my father muttered. “Try not to excite yourself,” my mother said.” New Yorker, June 2014



I find “battle-hardened” in dictionaries at hand, but not “battled-hardened,” which sounds somewhat awkward to me. This word (battled-hardened) is repeated in the lead copy of the article in New Yorker Home page.


The article is really humorous and entertaining, and wordings of the battle scene are really snappy. But, is “battled-hardened” one of New Yorker's renowned idiosyncrasies, or just a typo?



Answer



There are lots of cases where the first piece is an adjective (even a participle) or an adverb instead of a noun, but battle-hardened is not one of those. Therefore it really must be a typo, because it means hardened by battle.


Most of the compounds where the second piece is a past participle and the first piece a noun work that way. For example:



air-cooled, belt-driven, carbon-dated, deer-proofed, feather-topped, hand-sewn, gas-powered, iron-plated, jet-propelled, knife-edged, love-begotten, market-tested, need-rooted, oil-tempered, punch-drunk, quarter-sawed, rain-proofed, store-boughten, tailor-made, user-oriented, vacuum-packed, wind-swept, X-linked, yeast-bitten, and zero-padded.



Those all mean “verbed by/with/for (the/a) noun”.


There are also many versions where the first part is a noun but the second part is now a present participle instead of a past participle. These mean “verbing (the/a) noun”. For example:



air-breathing, body-snatching, class-leading, death-defying, deep-searching, earth-moving, fact-finding, gas-guzzling, hair-splitting, iron-binding, jaw-breaking, key-winding, king-killing, labour-saving, market-leading, night-flowering, orange-fuming, penny-pinching, rabble-rousing, sabre-rattling, thought-provoking, underside-couching, water-bearing, and yuck-making.



However, there are some that admit both versions, like fork-tailed and forked-tailed, so it is not a bad question that you have asked.


There do exist other examples where both halves are in participle form besides just forked-tailed, but these occur at about three orders of magnitude less frequency than the first set. Other examples like that are words such as broken-hearted and cloven-hoofed.


Those work more like big-hearted, deep-rooted, half-baked, etc., because the first word is no longer a noun but a modifier, either an adjective or an adverb.



Addendum


Appending the text of Janus’s insightful comment so that its text not be lost, and be searchable:



Words like broken-hearted also have in common that the second member of the compound is a noun, rather than a verb, to which has simply been added an adjectival suffix -ed. They’re not real past participles. You can (just about) consider to battle-harden or to wind-sweep a verb, but there is no such verb as to forked-tail or to broken-heart.



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