[quote name=\'fostergray82\' post=\'221651\' date=\'Aug 1 2009\']"Bales of Hay" and "The Scales of Justice" are actual phrases, and that's how you commonly refer to them. Saying "Hay Bales" or "Justice Scales" sound awkward and don't make as much sense. With illegal prepositional phrases (i.e. Tony Randall's "stuffings in little bottles of pills"), you can easily switch that around to say "pill bottle stuffings", although you risk being too descriptive.[/quote]
Yeah, the intention behind the prepositional rule was never to catch players in an arbitrary technicality (though it sometimes seemed that way); my understanding is that it was to prevent them from stringing together separate elements.
For example, Jackée Harry was cuckoo'd for giving the clue "a wolf on a mountain" for "things that howl." Dick explained that she could have legally said "a mountain wolf." One can examine these two phrases and observe no meaningful distinction, but "a wolf on a mountain" could just as easily be expanded to "a wolf on a mountain seeking a mate while gazing up at the night sky." A bale of hay is a single entity, while a wolf and a mountain are separate.
A mountain wolf would be single entity, but I still question that clue's legality, as I don't believe that there is such an animal as a mountain wolf (unlike a mountain goat, mountain lion or mountain gorilla).