[HN Gopher] New York's Hyphenated History
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       New York's Hyphenated History
        
       Author : overwhelm
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2021-05-29 16:25 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theparisreview.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theparisreview.org)
        
       | pimlottc wrote:
       | Wow. I had to click the link for the book to confirm this was all
       | true. If it had been published on April 1st, I would have been
       | sure it was a joke.
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://archive.is/hojvb
        
       | nohuck13 wrote:
       | "It was only when the pejorative phrasing of "hyphenated
       | Americans" came into vogue in the 1890s, emboldened by
       | Roosevelt's anti-hyphen speech, that the pressure for the
       | hyphen's erasure came to pass."
       | 
       | So the claim is that 1890's US anti-immigration campaigns caused
       | such anti-hyphen sentiment that we abandoned the traditional
       | hyphenation of... place names? (except for holdouts such as the
       | New-York historical society).
       | 
       | I am not an academic who studies punctuation over time (surely
       | you exist!) but I... have trouble rejecting the null hypothesis
       | of, like, grammar just evolved, and people increasingly tended to
       | use a non-archaic spelling?
       | 
       | If US anti-immigration campaigns did cause hyphen dropping, why
       | don't we see any big non-American English-speaking place names
       | with hyphens? (New-South-Wales?)
       | 
       | Also, the text itself feels like a stretch; Roosevelt's gave his
       | hyphenated Americans speech in 1915, not amidst the anti-
       | immigrant sentiment of the 1890s
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-30 23:02 UTC)