Craiglist Post Raises Urgent Hyphenation Question

Would you hyphenate chill-out? Yes, we think we would. That is all. Thanks, Craigslist.

 

Music Vid - Female Astronaut Needed $150 (Central Los Angeles)

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Date: 2010-08-16, 7:31PM PDT
Reply to: gigs-fwvpk-1902912839@craigslist.org ^{[Errors when replying to ads?]}

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Fit female needed for a electronic chillout Music Video.

Looking for a lady 18-30 to float around in outer space in your birthday suit and a helmet.
A dark complexion and being able to dance like a robot are a plus.

Please attach a body shot and any additional relevant information.
Pay is 150 cash.

Thank you.

• Location: Central Los Angeles
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
• Compensation: 150

PostingID: 1902912839

The Hyphen Marches On (and Away)

Yes, the English language is an ever-changing thing. Hyphenated word pairs often lose the punctuation and become one word. If only we could lose our pot-belly, er pot belly, as easily...

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
Fri Sep 21 20:54:35 UTC 2007

By Simon Rabinovitch
LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails [SPOGG: THIS USED TO BE E-MAIL], spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf
hobby horse
ice cream
pin money
pot belly
test tube
water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
leapfrog
logjam
lowlife
pigeonhole
touchline
waterborne

Thanks to Sheryl M. for the story.

Grammar for Spammers: Dirtybird Edition

In the inbox this morning:

Looking for a one night stand?

Hookup tonight with other hot, sexy people in your area looking for some "No Strings" adventures!

Sigh. It's one-night stand--we would never dream of doing it without a hyphen. And "hook up" is two words when used as a verb. There is no reason to capitalize No Strings. And for the love of index fingers, please! Stop with the unnecessary quotation marks.

We will always wonder, though, how they knew those sexy people were in our "area." We do try to keep that part covered with a bathing suit...

A Fine Line

It's a fine line between co-op and coop--literally.

We know, we know. Women are sometimes called hens. Chicks, too. And we know that some dictionaries accept "coop" without the hyphen to refer to a cooperative business organization. We are also aware that Harvard's Bookstore is called the Coop, with this meaning in mind. It took us the better part of our undergraduate education to know it was a co-op, not a chicken enclosure. No wonder we didn't get into Harvard.

Thanks to Becca for the photo, taken at Seattle's Folklife Festival (it's about music, not poultry).

This is What You Get for 99 Cents

Sue C. sends the following gems from Texas:

In the Houston Chronicle last week, we noticed an ad for the local 99¢ Only Stores. It said "Now open 8AM to 9PM 9 days a week!!"

We thought maybe it was a one-time typo, but noooooo--today's paper has an ad from the same store, with the same information. We think the extra two days may be located in the DiscWorld, probably in Ankh-Morpork.

I bought a package of "eclipse" gum one day last week, and it says on the front, "Natural Germ Killing Incredibly Fresh Breath!" But what does one do if one has to kill unnatural germs with one's incredibly fresh breath?!

SPOGG reads this label differently. We believe it's a natural germ--as opposed to a lab-created one--on the rampage against minty breath. This germ must be found and stopped ... before it multiplies.

Cars Today: So Sophisticated

Karen S. sent this photo to us. It demonstrates just how sophisticated today's cars really are. The new ones can buy service for themselves! Anyone who's ever wasted an afternoon in the service shop knows how life-changing this really is.

Of course, it's also possible that there should have been a hyphen between "car" and "buying" (or even between "new" and "car"). This would have made it clear that there is a service available for people buying new cars, or a new service available for people buying cars--whichever is the case.

But then they might have had to change the layout of the sign and it wouldn't have looked as pretty and ... and... and...

Sometimes, grammar is just a pain. Especially when it means we still have to take our cars to the service station ourselves.

That Is a Very Large Heart

This just in...

Human-sized heart found at the Paw Paw car wash
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PAW PAW, Mich. -- A human-sized heart found at a southwestern Michigan car wash has investigators wondering whether it came from a person or an animal. The organ was discovered in a corner of a manual wash bay at Soapy's Car Wash, Paw Paw police said. The owner of the business found it Monday on the floor of the bay, according to WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids and WWMT-TV in Kalamazoo.

Do you think it was the size of a six-foot man? An average-sized woman? Or maybe a toddler? No matter what, that's one big heart!

In the event the reporter meant the find was the size of a human heart, though, it would have been better to recast this headline and lead something like this:

Possible human heart found at car wash (where is Paw Paw,
anyway?)

A heart found at a southwestern Michigan car wash has investigators wondering whether it came from a person or animal. (And yes, the passive voice is fine in this sentence because the heart is more important than the investigators.)

This Started as a Spelling Post, But the Hyphen Error is Better

This comes from one of those Indian news services that pilfers content and reproduces it without attribution (they have done this to our Encarta columns), so we don't know if the punctuation errors are original or added. At any rate:

Gloucestershire, October 3:
A primary school in Gloucestershire, [sic] finally decides to do away with the teacher’s all time [sic] favorite - dictation or spelling tests, as [they are?] more commonly known, for the fear of instilling a sense of failure in the child incase [sic] he/she didn’t make it in the test. [Failed the test, perhaps? Or is the penalty for misspelling death?

Quoting the tests as "unnecessarily distressing" [this is a direct quote?] for the children, the Headmistress Debbie Marklove of the Whitminster Endowed Church of England Primary School, near Stroud, decided to do away with the whole process of learning words at home and reproducing them at school in the form of a test.

"Each school and each pupil has different needs and each school knows its own pupils best," she said. According to Debbie, the whole process left the children with a sense of failure when the words learnt by them at home were finally reproduced in the test wrongly spelt.

All the parents of the 105 odd [sic] students attending the school received a written message from the school in order to inform them about the school’s new policy, which banned all spelling tests.

It should be 105-odd students--otherwise, it's calling the students "odd" when they're merely sissies for falling to pieces over spelling exams.

We'd Rather They Used Vegans

Jim sends along the following photo.

Please note the announcement in the lower right-hand corner: "VEGETARIAN FED HENS."

Does this mean the hens were fed by a vegetarian? Does it mean they dined on vegetarians? Does this really make a difference in the quality of the egg?

Wait.

Are they trying to say the hens that laid the eggs ate vegetables? Then they would be vegetable-fed hens. That's the really crazy thing about language, people. If you use simple words, chances are you can get your meaning across. Also, it's news to us that people have been feeding chickens meat. That is extremely gross, and possibly cruel. Does this taste like chicken to you, Becky Layer? Me, too. I think I'm going to hurl!

That said, it is possible that the chickens did eat vegetarians, and that the farmer responsible for this fowl soylent-greening got his due from a burglar. We found this in the news today, and it definitely sounded like a vegetarian or possibly even vegan hate crime:

Authorities: Burglar wakes men with spice rub

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

FRESNO, Calif. -- Authorities say they've arrested a man who broke into the home of two California farmworkers, stole money, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.

Fresno County sheriff's Lt. Ian Burrimond says 22-year-old Antonio Vasquez was found hiding in a field wearing only a T-shirt, boxers and socks after the Saturday
morning attack.

He says deputies arrested Vasquez after finding a wallet containing his ID in the ransacked house.

The farmworkers told deputies the suspect woke them Saturday morning by rubbing spices on one of them and smacking the other with an 8-inch sausage.

Burrimond says money allegedly stolen was recovered.

Miserable Muffins

They're in the oven RIGHT NOW, so we can't say how they taste. But we're a bit worried these muffins may be the last thing we eat:

To Die For Blueberry Muffins

We think it's possible they meant to hyphenate the recipe: to-die-for blueberry muffins. That would be a fine recipe, indeed.

Still, if we're going to sacrifice ourselves for something, it might as well be baked goods.

Hyphen-ventilating

Thank you (we mean thank-you) to Peyton M. for this one:

John McCain needs YOU!

The John McCain 2008 Presidential Campaign is looking for interns for positions available immediately in our Arlington, Virginia headquarters.

In addition to giving you real-world work experience, this program provides an opportunity to participate in the most exciting presidential election in history! Campaign Internships are unpaid and participants are responsible for arranging their own transportation and housing.

Interns will work with staff on various projects essential to the campaign and play a significant role in Senator McCain’s campaign.

Interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter (with availability) to: Volunteer2@JohnMcCain.com

Thank-you! [sic]
John Cummins, Deputy Director of Volunteers
Volunteer2@JohnMcCain.com

There is no hyphen in thank you. Thank you. That is all.

On second thought, we did notice the hyphen in real-world work experience. This is fine. But is there any such thing as fake-world work experience? When there isn't an opposite to the modifier, you generally don't need the modifier. Politicians. Must they always bloat things?

Get Paid to Date

This comes from a Parade Magazine article about paid sick leave:

While polls show that Americans strongly support the idea, businesses are concerned about the cost. "Employers have finite resources," says Lisa Horn of the Society for Human Resource Management. "A paid-leave man-date would likely force employers to make up the cost by reducing wages or health-care coverage."

You know, if we could have a paid man-date (or a woman-date--we're open-minded), we wouldn't mind a little bite out of our salary. Long live the bromance and the womance! The world would be a better place for a little more love.

What?!? They meant mandate? That's something completely different. Even so, we are in favor of paid sick leave for employees, perhaps even more than we are in favor of man-dates.


Thanks to Xavier D. for the swell find.

Show Me the Grammar

From the Kansas City Star:

Hyphen missing from new Missouri license plates
By MARCUS KABELThe Associated Press

Missouri will not correct a grammatical error in new license plates because that's how voters want it to be, a state Department of Revenue spokesman said Friday.

The plates featuring a bluebird, the official state bird, are due out in June despite the fact that they're missing the hyphen in the state's nickname, "Show-Me State."
David Griffith, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Revenue, said they won't correct the mistake because that's how it looked when voters chose it in an online contest last year.

"If the people want it that way, that's what we're going to deliver for the people," Griffith said.

The rules of grammar require the hyphen, Missouri Southern State University English professor Dale Simpson said. "If you have a compound modifier before a noun, it would be hyphenated," he said.

About 2 million of the plates have been produced so far, but another 10 million have yet to be made to fulfill demand for the next two years, Griffith said. The department could reorder the remaining majority of plates to include the hyphen but does not plan to do so, he said.

More...

The punchline? Fifty-six percent of the voters surveyed on the site said they didn't care about the hyphen. Oh, sadness!

A Grammar Fable

Enjoy this dose of wit from the one and only Craig Conley.

The Grammarian and the Dingbat

One fine evening a strolling man heard a cry for help from the bottom of a deep well.

"What's the matter?" he called down.

"I am a grammarian," came the reply. "I've fallen and I can't get up."

"Hold on, professor, and I'll fetch up a rope," said the man.

"One moment, please!" called the grammarian. "Your grammar and diction are faulty; be good enough to amend them."

"In that case, I'll go for a long dash," said the man.

"It's a hyphen, you dingbat!" cried the grammarian, but the man was long gone, and for good.

(inspired by a Sufi tale told by Rumi, as collected in Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah)

To Market to Market...

Do you think the people at Bloomberg are riding Segway scooters to the U.S. market? Or did the editors mean "segue"?

Also, where in the world is Jaguar-Land? We're sort of scared to go there, even on a Segway. Of course, an en-dash instead of a hyphen would indicate it's a deal between Jaguar and Land Rover, but that's a decidedly less interesting proposition.

A hyphen is the narrow one, an en-dash is as wide as the capital N, and an em-dash is as wide as a capital M. Use en-dashes for date ranges and the like. Em-dashes separate chunks of sentences—like this.

- hyphen
– (— gives you an en-dash)
— (— gives you an em-dash) (thanks to the dashing Barry L. for assistance with the code)

Thanks to Craig Conley for the screenshot.

Putting the High in Hyphen

Catherine G. sends this from her Altlanta TV station. It's about the man who was once engaged to the "runaway bride":

John Mason, the man who was once engaged to runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, has gotten married -- to another woman.

His father, Claude Mason, tells People magazine that John Mason married Shelley Martin in a quiet ceremony Saturday in Duluth.

Claude Mason, who serves as an associate municipal judge and officiated the ceremony, says the family was very happy for John Mason.

John Mason currently works as the general manager of a family medical facility in Duluth. His new bride, Martin, works in pharmaceutical sales.

Claude Mason says the two met through Martin's cousin, who was a high school classmate of John Mason's.

Now it's true that a good percentage of high-school students take drugs. But they should only be called high school students, without the hyphen, if we know for sure they're stoned. For all we know, though, that is a good state to be in when you're fixing up a man who had a really bad first-wedding experience.

The Poetic Professor

SPOGG sent the following letter to Harold Levine, a professor emeritus in Stanford University's math department:

Dear Professor Levine:

In the course of our research, we came across an advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City.

We were disturbed to note that instead of a hyphen the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel management has inserted an equal sign between its two names.

It did occur to us that perhaps there is a legitimate mathematical relationship being expressed by the equal sign, one that we are presently failing to appreciate.

In your vast mathematical experience, does Waldorf, in fact, equal Astoria? Or is this simply an example of a hyphenation abomination?

Sincerely yours,

SPOGG

As it turns out, the professor has a good sense of humor. His reply:

That Waldorf equals Astoria
Comes as an unexpected surprise
Which should not provoke hysteria
Though grammarians must avert their eyes

We're Tearing Up

Barry L. caught this great example of a nasty bit of verbing in today's New York Times (though it's an Associated Press piece).

Police Tear Gas Zimbabwe Opposition

Yow.

"Police Use Tear Gas On Zimbabwe Opposition" isn't THAT much longer.

But we certainly "gas" people, as a verb, so maybe "Police Tear-Gas Zimbabwe Opposition"

Barry's right. The hyphen does make this better.

It's a bad headline not just because of the missing hyphen, though.

"Tear" has two meanings (and two pronunciations). There's "tear," as in the thing that leaks from your eye. And there's "tear," which is what you do to your garments when you see a really terrible (or tearable) headline. A reader coming to the story cold doesn't know which one this is, and could spend quite a bit of mental energy translating the headline.

It's true that newspaper headlines often have to be short. This one should have been rewritten to avoid that ambiguity.

See the story.

The Poor, Innocent Juggler

We belong to several discussion groups for writers. While we don't ordinarily point out errors in e-mail settings, the following comes from a discussion about typos:

If you happen to notice a co-workers zipper is down (highly un-professional, but it can happen to any of us) do you discretely let them know so they can save face; or do you go for the juggler & tell everybody in the board room how un-reputable they are as a manager or layer based on a rather simple error.

Sigh. Where to begin? Some errors are easy.

• Co-worker's (or colleague's) needs an apostrophe and no hyphen.
• Unprofessional doesn't need a hyphen, either. Also, is it unprofessional to have a fallen zipper, or is it unprofessional to be looking at a colleague's bathing-suit zone?
• Discreetly has two e's in this context. It means tactfully or subtly. Discrete with one e means completely separate or unconnected--chances are if you went that route, your colleage wouldn't hear you.
• Unless many coworkers are running around with open barn doors, you have to say "him or her" to keep your subject and object parallel.
• Go ahead and write out the whole "and." Ampersands should be used with company names, some academic references, when space is limited, or in artsy-fartsy logos.
• Un-reputable is not a word. Disreputable is.
• And for the sake of clowns, leave the juggler alone. Go for the jugular--if you must.

The Difference a Hyphen Makes

We found this headline in today's paper:

Arrest in student-porn actress' death

We're not porn conoisseurs, but we do not believe there is such a thing "student" porn. There are student teachers, yes. And there is amateur porn as well as professional porn. But student porn? We don't think so. Yet, this is what the hyphen indicates. When two words are linked by a hyphen, they modify the noun that follows. In this case, they imply she was an actress in student pornography.

The punctuation mark the editors should have used was the slash. She was both a student and a porn actress. A student/porn actress, if you will.

What a sad story.