gestaculation raju, come here a minute--I have something for you...

jheem, I think you're right in saying hyphenating is idiomatic. I tend to have my own system (though it seems more like a non-system!) of doing it. In your second example, it would never have occurred to me that American might modify shenanigans.

I think, in the case of these garden-path sentences (and, thank you--I like that term), that we're just going to have to take them on a case-by-case status, dealing with some "as is". The rewrite above sounded okay, but others would be bordering into the ridiculousness of that statement by Churchill: the Something, up with which I will not put.