Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by jeeva » Tue, Dec 16, 2014, 4:57 PM UTC

mxfh wrote: post #164

spdustin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your examples relate to the knowing use of, let's say, "flavorful" language. The author's "flavor" appears to be "hyphen-happy" - do you believe his intent was to style his writing that way for dramatic or artistic effect?

A traditional publisher would have most likely turned any random author down in the first place as it was the norm throughout the history of publishing with high initial costs and a few publishing houses functioning as gatekeepers. Then there were the so called (vanity) self-publishing houses who more or less capitalized on the rejects, while asking for a quite significant amount of money first to print and rudimenta…

The quote reminds me of the 'hairy arm' idea, which I quite enjoy. A quick Google gave me this: http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html

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

#182

Post by thizzbuzz » Tue, Dec 16, 2014, 10:44 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #127

ajkjk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His point entirely stands despite your carelessly dismissing one part of it.

Style is not the same as making a mistake.

And who should be the arbitrator of style vs. mistake?

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

#183

Post by Dylan16807 » Tue, Dec 16, 2014, 11:58 PM UTC

thizzbuzz wrote: post #182

Dylan16807 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Style is not the same as making a mistake.

And who should be the arbitrator of style vs. mistake?

It's easy enough to ask the person that wrote it. Why, do you think answering that is typically difficult or unclear?

And to be clear I mean asking about specific instances, so don't point back at the blog post, which seems to be a case of Amazon making a mistake. All of the hyphens quoted from Moonstruck are grammatically correct.

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

#184

Post by thizzbuzz » Wed, Dec 17, 2014, 1:01 AM UTC

simi_ wrote: post #44

lclarkmichalek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They derail the conversation. Of course they're annoying..

I will never mind a "Hey, you misspelled «X»". I can agree "Ha, he misspelled «Y», he's such a complete moron" is annoying/disruptive, but I don't think the answer to assholes is to stop caring about basic grammar rules. Incidentally, as an outsider I've never seen people being as careless/clueless with their language as British/American people are. A result of the education system or society, maybe.

By calling yourself an outsider, I'm assuming that you don't speak British or American English? If so, you're not really in a good position to judge grammaticality.

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

#185

Post by thizzbuzz » Wed, Dec 17, 2014, 2:54 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #183

thizzbuzz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who should be the arbitrator of style vs. mistake?

It's easy enough to ask the person that wrote it. Why, do you think answering that is typically difficult or unclear? And to be clear I mean asking about specific instances, so don't point back at the blog post, which seems to be a case of Amazon making a mistake. All of the hyphens quoted from Moonstruck are grammatically correct.

True, if the process just involves asking the author then I have no issues with that, and it should be easy to resolve.

I do think it is difficult for anyone other than the author to answer that question though. For me, only the "red-head scarf" example would be a mistake, but others in this thread indicated that 3 or 4 of the examples were wrong for them.

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

#186

Post by undersuit » Wed, Dec 17, 2014, 9:00 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #74

joesmo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be easily rectified if they looked up the words on each side of the hyphen. If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. If they are just partial words, then they should. But removing a book from circulation based on an obviously shoddy algorithm should never happen. As a Kindle author myself, I'm having second thoughts about the platform. Censorship by robots isn't exactly an attractive fe…

> If they are actual words, then that hyphen should not count. That would have side-effects e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name

Names are proper nouns and therefore capitalized, the edge case is resolved until you find a proper noun with capitalization in the middle of the word with the hyphen coming before the capital letter. This seems to be limited to foreign words(German in particular) and Company Names where the author inserted a hyphen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamelCase#Current_usage_in_nat...