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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

graemereynolds.wordpress.com

61–70 of 186 posts

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

#61
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Motorhome is not hyphenated.

I blame spellcheck. In many cases the most legible solution is a German-style mashingwordstogether, but spellcheck systems highlight those so people hyphenate instead.

For example, spellcheck has a curly red underline right now. But would it really look better as spell-check?

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

#62
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Theirs always someone nitpicking... https://i.imgur.com/L2Rhc.png Based on my limited experience, people who think grammar Nazis are annoying shouldn't be suspected of being too intelligent.

Language is about communicating ideas, I couldn't care less if someone leaves out that arcane little tick or uses the wrong pronoun. In 99% of cases it makes no difference to comprehensibility.

Not to someone who can't tell the difference, no. But that's true of anything.

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

#63
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet somehow they didn't pull A Dance With Dragons, which had appalling hyphenation in the original release.

You're blaming them for giving different treatment to an author who's at least a million times more important to their business?

Yes. That's probably why he's beating up on Amazon....because they're picking on the little guys while ignoring the big ones.

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

#64
post #33

"and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage" AHEM

Let me copy/paste a reply I just posted. "Let me shame you every time you introduce a bug/typo in your code."

The compiler I use does that already, thanks

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

#65
post #54

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.

'red-head scarf' certainly isn't an acceptable use of a hyphen, unless the scarf is woven from the hair of a red-haired person.

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

#66
post #59
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't remember where I came across it (possibly Gowers' Plain Words), but I like the rule that you should hyphenate to avoid ambiguity but not otherwise. E.g. is "a red head scarf" a red scarf for the head or a scarf for red heads? From context, it should be obvious, but hyphenating "head scarf" would make it explicit. (Of course, you could always avoid the problem entirely by using "headscarf" instead.)

There are some exceptions: e.g., I've read you should always write "Douglas-fir" instead of "Douglas fir" because it's not actually a fir.

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

#67
post #50
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely missing the point, Mr. Know-it-all.

Weird that you call me Mr Know it all when i have already said that my grammar is terrible. You're missing the point - when a person is complaining about other people's misuse of grammar, and does so on a webpage that has "grammar matters" in big letters at the top, they really need to make sure that their grammar is not blatantly incorrect. Obvious errors discredit the point they're trying to make. See also Skitt's…

You're missing the point. The author is really talking about Amazon suppressing creativity in the written word. If you're going to take issue with the title, you should probably go with the "should be a title more in line with this theme". Clearly the title is hanging people up.

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

#68

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'm quite sure that "two-week Easter holiday" is correct in both English(US) and English(UK)[1]. The use of the hyphen in such examples is somewhat analogous to Haskell's use of "$" as a precedence operator, so we know which word modifies which.

But you're correct that the others examples are erroneous, some egregiously so. I had to read the "red-head scarf" several times before I was finally able to parse out the presumed meaning: "red headscarf".

1. Source: me. I worked for 10 years as a translator, editor, and proofreader for Lionbridge and many other multinational publishing and localization companies before moving into software development.

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

#69
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what the author is talking about. They mean hyphenated words such as 'wind-up'. The current screen or font doesn't make a difference for whether or not that's hyphenated. You're thinking of hyphenation for splitting a word over a line.

That's what the author thinks the problem is, but we don't know because the book isn't available and there isn't a list of the hyphenated words. It's possible that most of those hyphens are line-break hyphens, not word-join hyphens.

The author claimed that this wasn't the case. I don't see why I would take this as a bad faith posting. You'd think if it actually were the case, Amazon would have a better way of indicating so.

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

#70
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theirs always someone nitpicking...

> Theirs always someone nitpicking... https://i.imgur.com/L2Rhc.png Based on my limited experience, people who think grammar Nazis are annoying shouldn't be suspected of being too intelligent.

http://youtu.be/N4vf8N6GpdM
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