"camera-mounted drone"?

[Galen Buttitta]

Yeah, that isn't how I would've put it, but I can see where the author was coming from—a drone with a camera mounted on it. It's awkward but I can certainly see where the author was going with it, even though I would've phrased it differently.

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> On Nov 24, 2013, at 21:21, "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      "camera-mounted drone"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A man trying to find the remains of perhaps 500 Marines killed on
> Tarawa in WWII whose bodies are still unrecovered  had "launched a
> camera-mounted drone" to produce an aerial photograph.  NYTimes
> Magazine, today, 32/2.
>
> Shouldn't that be "drone-mounted camera", the drone being what the
> camera was mounted on?  If one reads "an elephant-mounted mahout",
> surely it's the mahout mounted on the elephant.  I would not expect
> to read about "a mahout-mounted elephant."  I suppose in this case
> the size disparity forces a single visual image.  But if the sizes
> are more nearly equal?  Such as at the circus -- a "lion-mounted
> tiger" vs. a "tiger-mounted lion"?  An "A-mounted B" is a B mounted on an A?
>
> Joel
>
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