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I am reading a book and there's one sentence: "race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason." (from Born A Crime by Trevor Noah)

I wonder how "crime" and "worse" connect? is it okay to just put the adjective behind or there is " which is" between them?

So the original should be " a crime (which is) worse than treason"?

Thanks!!!

user403214
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    The sentence is fine as is, it isn't supposed to have extra words. I don't think "original" is the word you want for the concept, but yes, "a crime which is worse than treason" is the meaning. – nnnnnn Nov 07 '20 at 04:57
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    Clause cutting is a tool in every writer's toolbox to do away with verbiage. Yes, there is a which is (precisely, that is) between the two words. –  Nov 07 '20 at 04:57
  • Hi, thank you guys. So how about this sentence: "The guy who is my brother is playing the piano." is it okay to remove "who is" and turn it into "The guy my brother is playing the piano."? – user403214 Nov 07 '20 at 05:03
  • Congratulations; you've rediscovered (parts of) what linguists call "deep structure" and "transformational grammar". That means the "underlying" organization and how it changes; here it's a relative clause, which gets operated on by a syntactic rule called Whiz-Deletion that removes the predictable which is part of the relative clause. – John Lawler Nov 07 '20 at 22:28

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