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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

graemereynolds.wordpress.com

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Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#51

Post by mxfh »

The big issue here are not the hyphens, other than maintaining formatting for different devices the publisher should not mess with the content after an author approved edit.

Traditionally there was the copy editing process done by the publisher, but automating this on a the-customer-is-always-right process would probably have left a lot of hard to digest classics no where to be found.

And seriously? Running a work of literature against a dictionary for other reasons than supervised spell-checking?

Literature is about expressiveness not about serfdom to grammar or spelling.

What about Neologisms? There would be no nerds without inventive authors like Seuss. http://flavorwire.com/291507/everyday-words-that-were-invent...

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There surely still is a need for copy editing, proper formatting and layout, which was almost never done by the author alone, and also requires a different skill set than that of a typical author. These are the services a publisher should offer, but doing this without involving the author for final approval is just false.

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see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solecism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism also Cacography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catachresis

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#52

Post by zelos »

jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg.

"The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..."

That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#53

Post by heinrich5991 »

zelos wrote: post #52
jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

I don't know, in mathematics we say that we have a K-vector space when it really means K-(vector space).

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#54

Post by swalsh »

jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

Those to me seem like a perfectly acceptable use of a hyphen.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#55

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

zelos wrote: post #52
jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Yeah, all of those are pretty bad. I would have complained too if I had read this book.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#56

Post by hartator »

jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

Good point, I've caught a few other things that grind my gears.

"Are there people out there so fucking mind-bogglingly stupid that the inclusion of a – between two words confuses them enough to be torn from the story and ruin the reading experience so much that they felt obliged to write to Amazon and complain?"

I think that the author insulting someone who have paid for his book is not something intelligent, nice or professional.

"Do they need to do something about the quality of the ebooks on their device? Oh yes. Absolutely no question about it."

I was going to argue freedom of speech and the ability to form ideas the way the author intended is what matters here, but the author himself doesn't seem to agree himself.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#57

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

swalsh wrote: post #54
jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

Those to me seem like a perfectly acceptable use of a hyphen.

Motorhome is not hyphenated.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#58

Post by ChicagoDave »

My experience with Amazon's "rules" are that they tend to be so heavily automated that their support staff couldn't change anything if they wanted to. So my suggestion to Mr. Reynolds is to strip the hyphens and move on. Amazon is a bit of a monopoly and your only other choice is to not use their services.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#59

Post by shreve »

zelos wrote: post #52
jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Yes. What they were going for was "red head-scarf", but that is also questionable. I've only ever seen "head scarf" unhyphenated.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#60

Post by esquivalience »

zelos wrote: post #52
jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

To be fair, "two-week" isn't wrong... but it's in bad company.
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