Correct or not: noun and adjective being predicative together

I'm thinking about such a sentence:

He is a lawyer, arrogant and smart.

or

He is an idiot, arrogant and short-sighted.

Please note that here I just want to list the noun and the adjectives altogether, no casual relation between the noun and the adjectives (like he is arrogant and smart because he is a layer).

Though I think I've seen similar ones before, I'm not 100% sure whether it's correct or not.

So put it formally, is it grammatically correct to put nouns and adjectives together as a predicate?

Solution 1:

According to Dictionary.com

A single sentence can contain both predicate nominatives and predicate adjectives. For example, “She’s an engineer and is happy.” Here, the predicate nominative is engineer and the predicate adjective is happy.

She's happy in addition to being an engineer. If your sentence were "He is a lawyer and is smart," it would parallel the example. "He is a lawyer and is arrogant and smart." adds another adjective, but still parallels the example, and would convey what you want to convey.

But in your sentence you don't repeat the linking verb, so that arrogant and smart read as if in apposition to lawyer (I don't think adjectives can stand alone in apposition, but they read that way),and so further defining lawyer. Like "He is a lawyer, a shark." Which isn't what you want to convey.

Repeating the linking verb would make your meaning clear.

http://www.dictionary.com/e/predicate-nominative-vs-predicate-adjectives