Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

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I read this on a magazine and was wondering if there should have been a preposition at the very beginning of it:

All the rage in the 1990s, car leasing lost its luster after the World Trade Center attacks, when automakers began handing out low-interest loans like candy on Holloween.

Thanks.

[2006]

No preposition is needed. Why did you think that one might be needed?

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Because 'All the rage in the 1990s' was not a complete sentence. I thought it needed a preposition to relate it to the following main sentence, just like 'of' in "Of all my enemies, he is the worst.

[2006]

"All the rage in the 1990s" is not supposed to be a complete sentence; it is followed by a comma, not a period. "All the rage in the 1990s" is an adjective phrase modifying "car leasing".

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[2006]

The phrase is not a noun phrase.

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It turns out 'all the rage' is an idiom, but it looked like a noun to me. Could you give me other examples of nouns used as adjectives?
I found 'gloom and doom', which is a noun, and when used as an adjective you have to hyphen it: gloom-and-doom, which looks like an adjective.

Sorry this post has been edited numerous times.

[2006]

I am not sure whether you are talking about nouns or noun phrases. A noun is a single word while a (noun) phrase has at least two words.

Nouns are very commonly useed as adjectives to modify another noun. Examples are chocolate cake, child actor and baseball game.

Noun phrases are less commonly used as adjectives. 'Gloom and doom' can be used as an adjective but we should call it a noun phrase, not a noun. Maybe you heard of 'gloom and doom scenarios'.
If you write it as 'gloom-and-doom', you have converted it into a hyphenated word.

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That clarified it for me. Thanks a lot, 2006.