[HN Gopher] How to use (or not use) a hyphen
___________________________________________________________________
How to use (or not use) a hyphen
Author : samizdis
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-04-26 07:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| staindk wrote:
| Alternate link -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220429155234/https://www.newyo...
| Melatonic wrote:
| I usually get distracted when reading material like this but this
| time I found it really -
| zestyping wrote:
| I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail".
|
| It's electronic mail -- just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader,
| e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-check, and so on. The
| lowercase "e-" prefix is broadly used and has a particular
| meaning.
|
| The hyphen makes it read better, just like A-bomb, I-beam,
| O-ring, S-curve, U-turn, V-neck, or X-ray. Without the hyphen it
| looks like the stress should lean on the second syllable ("em-
| AIL"); "email" looks as awkward to read as "abomb", "ibeam", or
| "oring".
|
| I know the ship has long since sailed on "e-mail". But to put it
| simply, it feels better to me.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Some compounds just seem to naturally shift from hyphen-
| separated to no separation. Just one facet of the evolution of
| language, its spelling, and the randomness at play. E-mail
| isn't necessarily any more deserving of a hyphen than words
| like permafrost or sitcom are. Why didn't they get hyphens? Who
| knows.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > The hyphen makes it read better,
|
| Along the same lines, I wish the standard for using the /
| required a space before and after.
|
| second/syllable
|
| second / syllable
|
| I find the latter much easier on the eye, especially when copy
| is dense. It's easier to read the individual words and identify
| the / at the same time. Without the spaces adds processing
| overhead imho.
| yccs27 wrote:
| To me, the omission of the hyphen represents a change in
| attitude towards e(-)mail: from "e-mail" as the electronic
| version of standard mail, to email as a digital communication
| channel in its own right.
| flowerbreeze wrote:
| I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native
| language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it
| would be a strange thing to send somebody.
| zestyping wrote:
| Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'?
| Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the
| correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
| staindk wrote:
| I must be younger than you. Have always thought 'email' just
| looks and feels better... but you make good points!
|
| Maybe it has something to do with frequency of use?
| "email"/"e-mail" must be used much more (and in more contexts -
| informal, formal, verbal, professional...) than the other
| examples you gave, so perhaps over time it was "slangified" and
| the hyphen dropped?
| rosmax_1337 wrote:
| Further on the topic of how words change: In swedish, we have
| lots of english loan words in our everyday vocabulary. (To
| the great dismay of some!) This has lead to the creation of
| the word "mejl", which comes from the swedish way of
| pronouncing email, where the "ai"-sound easily becomes a
| "ej"-sound, and later this has accentuated the prounciation
| of the word more and more.
|
| The word now is its own noun in our dictionary following the
| usual grammatical rules in swedish, for example:
|
| mejl - e-mail mejlet - the e-mail mejla - sending e-mail
|
| And it is also commonly used in compound words too. Like
| mejlkorg (e-mail bin), mejlkonversation (e-mail
| conversation), bluffmejl (hoax e-mail).
|
| I'm of the younger generation, and I quite like the way this
| works in swedish. "Mejl" to me seems like a thing in itself,
| rather than the two words electronic mail abbreviated.
| adamomada wrote:
| If I were to make a bet I'd say it's because e happens to be
| a vowel. It makes email look like a proper word. If it was
| instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you'd still see a
| hyphen
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| >If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think
| you'd still see a hyphen
|
| I thing "gmail" is the counter example.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| I have slipped into calling email "mail" and real mail "snail
| mail".
| johnday wrote:
| I have some bad news for you about the common words "ebook" and
| "ecommerce", among others.
| zestyping wrote:
| Remember eeePC? They were so ahead of the curve.
| phdelightful wrote:
| > In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word
| that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet
| mastered
|
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding but Latex does this pretty well
| ("mastered" is a bit fuzzy I guess).
| MikeDelta wrote:
| I think that is thanks to the Knuth-Plass algorithm, with Knuth
| being the inventor of Tex, which powers Latex. The problem
| seems not trivial indeed.
|
| http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-...
|
| http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaki...
| zamadatix wrote:
| The hyphenation dictionaries browsers use for CSS hyphenation
| seem to be pretty accurate as well. At least for English.
| jfk13 wrote:
| All those I'm aware of are directly based on those used in
| the TeX world, so that's to be expected.
|
| What browsers are less good at, though, is determining
| exactly which lines to hyphenate when the possibility exists.
| If the 'hyphens: auto' property is used, they tend to be too
| eager, whereas (La)TeX applies hyphenation much more
| judiciously.
| kqr wrote:
| It goes way beyond dictionaries though. Once you know where
| you _can_ break words, how do you know where you _should_
| break words?
|
| A simple flood fill will hyphenate very enthusiastically, use
| suboptimal breaking points, does not consider stretching
| whitespace, and leads to rivers and other artifacts.
|
| Many more sophisticated algorithms suffer from the same
| problems. Last I used LaTeX seriously, it also produced
| rivers where a human using e.g. Scribus would not.
| zestyping wrote:
| I wonder if they're referring to cases where the hyphenation
| opportunities differ for words with different meaning but
| identical spelling. In some cases, the meaning (and hence the
| accenting, and hence the hyphenation) can only be derived from
| context, as with "present", which can be hyphenated "pre-sent"
| or "pres-ent".
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| The New Yorker also makes some other... unconventional
| typographic decisions such as using a diaeresis in words like
| cooperate or reexamined
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Right. Good for them for having a unique style, but I don't
| know why anyone else would decide to format their text like
| this. Same thing with the recent "black"/"Black" decision by
| NYTimes.
| js2 wrote:
| The NYT, er, N.Y.T. has a crazy set of rules for
| acronyms/initialisms.
|
| Acronyms--which according to the N.Y.T is any initialism
| which is pronounceable as a word instead of by its individual
| letters--are styled in all capitals when they are four
| letters or fewer. Longer acronyms are styled in titlecase.
|
| Meanwhile, initialisms retain periods between the capital
| letters. (I find this to be terribly ugly since it messes up
| kerning.)
|
| So with this combination of rules we get this ridiculous
| result: N.F.L., NATO, and Nafta.
|
| They used to write "Nascar", but it seems they've changed
| their mind on that:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/now-it-is-
| officia...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/national-
| associat...
|
| I wonder if anyone can figure out why the N.Y.T. styles
| broadcast networks as acronyms? ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/magazine/on-language-
| ling...
| Stratoscope wrote:
| It gets even weirder. A few years ago the New Yorker had a
| short article talking about SOS, the emergency signal used
| in Morse Code.
|
| And they wrote it S.O.S. Which is patently wrong.
|
| SOS is not sent in Morse like this, as if it were three
| separate letters:
|
| dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit
|
| (The letter "S" is "dit dit dit" and the letter "O" is "dah
| dah dah".)
|
| It's sent all at once without pauses between the letters,
| because it is not the three separate letters at all. SOS is
| a "prosign", sent like this:
|
| dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit
|
| To help indicate this, SOS is customarily typeset with an
| overbar connecting the letters, like this:
| ___ SOS
|
| (If the bar above SOS has gaps in it when rendered on your
| device, imagine that it is one solid bar.)
|
| It's not an initialism, not three separate letters, and
| definitely not S.O.S.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gweinberg wrote:
| Maybe they believe the goofy legend that it stands for
| "save our ship".
| lou1306 wrote:
| Just playing devil's advocate here, but _cooperate_ and
| _cooper_ have different pronunciations, and _cooperate_ (or
| _co-operate_ ) makes it absolutely clear.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's the best kind of correct - technically correct.
|
| Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
| googlryas wrote:
| I can't imagine that to be the case, because this is
| English...there are numerous common words that are spelled
| exactly the same, but pronounced differently (read, wind,
| wound off the top of my head). The fact that they don't
| give them any special treatment(diatrics or something else)
| makes me think the legibility is not the concern.
|
| Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most
| words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as
| to what the word says. I personally have never misread
| cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
| zestyping wrote:
| I think it's more a question of what's easier on the
| reader, rather than what a reader can feasibly
| distinguish. Yes, words like "read", "present", "lead"
| have multiple prononunciations, but they have a cost; if
| half the words you encountered were like that, English
| would be very hard to read. I find "co-operate" slightly
| easier to read than "cooperate", at the expense of being
| slightly longer.
|
| These are all minor trade-offs (or is it tradeoffs?) of
| course; it's not a cut-and-dry (but hopefully not
| cutanddry) argument as to what to do in any individual
| case.
| stewx wrote:
| There is so much you can get for free these days. I see it on
| packages everywhere:
|
| -Gluten free
|
| -Sugar free
|
| -Fat free
|
| -Dairy free
| atoav wrote:
| There is this silly thing with typographic rules -- I just don't
| care about them too much.
|
| They are different in any language and other than languages
| themselves they are rather arbitrary conventions. Use whatever
| typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas
| you like to tell...?!
| brimble wrote:
| > Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it
| communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
|
| Following conventions & rules is exactly how you communicate
| those ideas. Failing to do so tends to cause confusion and
| distraction. It's not about what's right and what's wrong--it's
| about compassion for one's readers.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| > ?!
|
| I would like to introduce the interrobang: !?
| nescioquid wrote:
| You can have a little more nuance (as in chess annotations)
| with two characters:
|
| ?!: questionable or unsound move, but possibly strong
|
| !?: seems to be a strong move, but possibly unsound
|
| BTW, I thought these were all called interrobangs. Not so?
| testbjjl wrote:
| > Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it
| communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
|
| How you communicate is sometimes more important than what you
| communicate. How you communicate can detract from what you
| communicate. How you communicate allows the reader better grasp
| what you communicate.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The media is the massage.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Hyphenated prefixes are dumb. There's literally no reason for it.
| People already know how to pronounce cooperate. However, if
| you're feeling fancy, they proper punctuation is a diaeresis.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| If this stuff (typography, punctuation, etc.) interests you,
| definitely check out Butterick's Practical Typography [1]. Great
| resource and easy to follow.
|
| [1] https://practicaltypography.com/
| unmole wrote:
| But please don't do things like this:
|
| > Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
|
| > Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like
| so.
|
| Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining
| them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design
| language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit?
| The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles
| in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than
| simple underlining.
| flyingfences wrote:
| The site also has a page on Underlining [0], in which the
| author explains his perspective on underlining as an
| unsightly relic of mechanical typewriters, which had no other
| ways -- italicizing, bolding, different fonts, small-caps --
| of emphasizing text. His is a style guide for professional
| publishing, in which appearances matter.
|
| [0] https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html
| bombcar wrote:
| The sum and the whole of the law shall be do whatever
| everyone else does unless you have a damn good reason, imo.
| AlanYx wrote:
| Butterick's advice en dashes is fairly controversial though, in
| that it's the opposite of the advice given in Robert
| Bringhurst's _The Elements of Typographic Style_ and other
| works, with no real explanation given for Butterick 's
| position.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I can practically feel that cut off capital A in my arms and
| chest.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that anyone would write this article
| without mentioning the en-dash and em-dash. They are frequently
| confused with hyphens but serve a rich and sometimes overlapping
| variety of purposes.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash
|
| (Edited to fix the spelling of em-dash. Doh!)
| ramshorns wrote:
| My favourite example of this is using an en dash for a
| relationship between two separate things, rather than the more
| closely-connected compound adjective of a hyphen.
|
| Italian-American relations: foreign relations between the
| governments of Italy and the United States. Italian-American
| relations: relatives who have moved from Italy to the United
| States.
| caymanjim wrote:
| I'm surprised at how much of an impact your use of the en
| dash here has on how I read the sentence. I found myself
| pausing longer between words in my inner dialogue as I read
| "Italian-American".
| dboreham wrote:
| Came here to say the same. Reduces the authority of the article
| imho.
| deno wrote:
| Article is about (very pedantic) orthography not typography.
| There are at least two em dashes used in the article but--
| that's-(nevertheless)-completely-offtopic.
| dn3500 wrote:
| They don't mention it because the dash is dead. Check any major
| news web site, even the New York Times, and you'll find they
| often use the repulsive double hyphen in place of dash.
| thekoma wrote:
| The article has two Em dashes in the first paragraph. I
| believe haven't noticed the double hyphen anywhere. I know
| some word processors turn `--` to En dash and `---` to Em
| dash, so it might be a mix-up there.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Can't find any in the NYT today, but here's one from CNN: h
| ttps://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_ff31bbc01931e2dcb21eea5d2b
| ...
| lelandfe wrote:
| Their full site uses an en dash:
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/29/us/texas-migrant-arrest-
| progr...
|
| I'd be aghast if a double hyphen was the house style for
| a major news outlet.
| geoffpado wrote:
| Does it? I definitely see a double-hyphen at this link.
| dboreham wrote:
| Many applications will auto-correct, or typeset double dash
| to an En-dash. Perhaps they thought they were using such an
| editor?
| valenaut wrote:
| I always type -- for en dash. Usually text fields that
| accept markdown-like syntax will correct it, but I just
| leave it if they don't.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >repulsive double hyphen
|
| Why do you insult my Underwood? It has not harmed you.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > precious few are devoted to a single mark.
|
| "Eats Shoots and Leaves" is surely the canonical apostrophe rant.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| _Eats Shoots and Leaves_ is riddled with punctuation errors.
| What it _is_ is a canonical example of why the British, who
| long ago abandoned consistent punctuation, should not write
| books lecturing others about punctuation.
|
| I think the best takedown of this hilariously bad screed is
| here:
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/bad-comma
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I don't treat it as a lecture; I treat it as a pretty funny
| rant.
|
| I agree that it's snobby; but I still enjoy her poke at
| "Carrot's PS1" - the "grocer's apostrophe". It's a book of
| satirical humour, you're not supposed to take it too
| seriously.
|
| Oh, the inconsistency of English is by design. Was it Doctor
| Higgins in My Fair Lady who claimed to be able to locate the
| origin of any English accent? The perverse grammar of English
| (and I suppose any other language) is a xenophobic
| shibboleth[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
| ramshorns wrote:
| I thought it was about a comma? But the book discusses all
| kinds of punctuation.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-04-29 23:02 UTC)