To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate

December 29, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

…that is the question.

English isn’t quite as fond of togetherstuck wordpairs as some languages, but it still comes close to loving them not wisely, but too well. Creating new words by compounding old ones is one of the main ways English expands its vocabulary (the other being outright piracy.) What this means for the writer is that at any given moment there are a number of English terms sitting uneasily on the hyphenated/unhyphenated fence.

The usual progression, in modern written English, goes from two separate words to a pair of hyphenated words to a single word:

hand held becomes hand-held becomes handheld
stand alone becomes stand-alone becomes standalone
hand book becomes hand-book becomes handbook

Handbook is a fascinating case. It started out in Old English as handboc, translating the Latin (liber) manualis — a book of a size to be held in the hand (as opposed to a honking great codex.) The word was replaced in Middle English by its snootier French equivalent, the Latin-derived manual, and manual remained the word of choice until the early 1800s, when hand book (or hand-book or handbook) was reintroduced by word lovers who wanted to return English to the purity of its Anglo-Saxon roots. The move was opposed, of course, by other word lovers, who regarded handbook as an ugly and unnecessary upstart, but the new (old) word caught on anyhow, and now we have handbook and manual both in our vocabulary as terms for more or less the same thing.

(A slight shade of difference does remain, however. Consider: given a Handbook of Emergency Procedures and a Manual of Emergency Procedures, which of the two books is more likely to fit into the pocket of a pair of cargo pants?)

So which spelling should you, as a writer, use? For those terms where there is a settled version, go with that one unless you have a firmly held preference for doing it the other way and are prepared to defend it. For the terms where the hyphenation issue is still in flux, pick the one you prefer and be consistent with it. Otherwise your longsuffering (long-suffering?) copyeditor^† will end up counting all your uses of standalone versus stand-alone in order to figure out which one you’ve used the most — and cursing your name all the way.

^†Another example of the hyphenization process in compound words. Most spell-checkers (spellcheckers?) will give a choice of copy editor or copy-editor, but all the practitioners of that trade whom I’ve had the good fortune to know have spelled it copyeditor.

A Pitfall for the Unwary

December 18, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

One of the bits of advice given to fledgling writers in the current era is “the spellchecker is your friend.”

Like a lot of advice-for-writers, this advice is both true and not-true. Or, to put it another way, the spellchecker is your friend, but it’s not your best friend. It’s the friend who’s fun to be with and helpful on the easy stuff, but who’s nowhere in sight when you’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do, or the one who’s got your back right up to the point where they run off with your prom date.

A spellchecker will catch your typos, and it will catch your misspellings . . . but only so long as the typos and misspellings aren’t also legitimate words in your spellchecker’s language-of-choice. It won’t do you a bit of good with the its/it’s problem, or the to/two/too problem, or the there/their/they’re problem, or any of those fatally similar and easily confused homonyms. It won’t remind you to put apostrophes in your possessives, and it won’t catch embarrassing stuff like pubic for public or untied for united.

As for your characters’ names, or for any terminology coined especially for the story you’re working on . . . unless you remember to add those words to the spellchecker’s user dictionary, it’s not going to keep you from messing those up either. And heaven help you if you accidentally add a wrong spelling to the user dictionary, because getting in there and taking it out again is not something most word processors tend to make easy.

The sad fact is that spellchecker or no spellchecker, there’s still no substitute for going over your manuscript by hand and eye before sending it out.

It’s Snowing, and I’m Feeling Peevish

December 16, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Listen up, people. It’s not hone in on, it’s home in on. Like a homing pigeon, or a heat-seeking missile, or one of the assortment of other things that pick out a home base, or a particular target, and are drawn or guided to it.

Also: The past tense of the verb to lead is led. If it’s spelled lead and pronounced the same as led, then it’s a noun not a verb and it’s a metal. On the other hand, the past tense of the verb to read, which rhymes with to lead, is read, which rhymes with led. English spelling is not logical. There are a lot of reasons for this; one of them is that the language started taking on its modern written form while the spoken language was still going through some heavy changes, particularly where the vowels were concerned.

And it isn’t orientated — it’s oriented. (If you’re disoriented, you don’t know which way is east. If the history of European cartography had gone differently, you might have been disoccidented instead, but fate decreed otherwise and a perfectly good adjective never even existed.)

Pick One and Stick to It

December 15, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, what to do about variant spellings.

This advice brought to you by OK/O.K./okay, that typically American and variously-spelled affirmative. All of the above spellings are acceptable, but you will not make your copyeditor happy if you use more than one of them in your manuscript. (And using ok in lower case is also iffy.)

Which one you prefer to use is your own business, and you can make the choice on the grounds of what you think looks good, or what you were taught in fifth grade, or what you will. (I chose “okay” on etymological grounds, because I prefer the theories that derive “okay” from either Native American or African terms to the theories that derive it from abbreviations of various American English phrases such as the humorously-misspelled “Oll Korrect”^†or the nickname “Old Kinderhook”^‡ — if you’re interested in the arguments on the subject, there’s a pretty good summary here.)

Just be consistent in using whichever one you decide works for you. You can get away with a great deal, at least in dealing with editors and copyeditors, so long as you make consistency one of your virtues.

^†Well, people thought it was humorous at the time. Fashions change, and a good thing, too.
^‡Martin van Buren.

Blogs for the Word-Obsessed

December 14, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

If, like me, you’re a member of the legion of the word-obsessed, here are some websites to keep you going on the long march:

Take a look, for starters, at harm•less drudg•ery, the blog of an actual working lexicographer. It’s literate, amusing, and full of the inside-dictionary baseball. A sample quote:

English is a little bit like a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned light sockets. We put it in nice clothes and tell it to make friends, and it comes home covered in mud, with its underwear on its head and someone else’s socks on its feet. We ask it to clean up or to take out the garbage, and instead it hollers at us that we don’t run its life, man. Then it stomps off to its room to listen to The Smiths in the dark.

From there, you can go to separated by a common language, a blog that deals with the differences between American and British English. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from a post on the difference between American and British mattress sizes, and the terms for same:

The short version: the basic sizes for American beds are twin, full, queen, and king, in ascending order. The basic sizes for British beds, respectively, are single, double, king,and super-king. Single bed and double bed are understood and used in the US, but they are not precise bed sizes there. For example, in AmE I could say that a (AmE) cot/(BrE) camp bed is a ‘single bed’ (it fits a single person), but not that it’s a ‘twin bed’, because twin is a particular size. Two twins make an AmE king–as one can find to one’s back-breaking and love-dampening horror in hotels where they make AmE-king-size beds out of two twins and a king-size sheet. (You said king-size bed! Singular! I want my money back!!)

So, if you buy king-size fitted sheets in one country, they won’t work as king-size in the other. Will the other sheets transfer? Probably not exactly.

Finally, there’s languagehat, the most venerable of the three — its archives go back to 2002. It’s full of interesting stuff on word histories and origins, along with a lot of good book reviews. A sample:

I’ve started Gene Wolfe’s Peace (recommended by Christopher Culver in this thread), and on the very first page he used a phrase unfamiliar to me: “I took the cruiser ax and went out…” (It’s not at all unusual to have to look things up when reading Wolfe; he has an extensive vocabulary and is not reluctant to deploy it.) There is definitely such a thing (here‘s one for sale: “2 1/2 lb. Double bit axe head 28″ Hickory handle. Overall length approximately 28″. Weight 3.63 lbs.”), but it wasn’t in any of my dictionaries, and I wanted to know where the name came from. Google Books told me it was sometimes called a cruiser’s ax (“And don’t forget to bring a light ax—a cruiser’s ax. Where you’re going, you could freeze to death without an ax and matches”—John Dalmas, The Reality Matrix, 1986), but that didn’t help much, since no definition of “cruiser” seemed appropriate… until I heaved my ancient and well-used Webster’s Third New International up from its honored place on my dictionary shelf and found definition 4a, “one who estimates the volume and value of marketable timber on a tract of land and maps it out for logging.” I’d still be interested to know exactly why and how that particular job description got matched with that particular ax, but the general idea is clear, and I am satisfied.

At all of these blogs, the comment sections are as lively and full of good stuff as the entries themselves.

It’s Different When It’s on Purpose

December 12, 2012December 12, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

In writing, there are some things you never want to get caught doing by accident. These are three of them.

One: being funny. Intentional humor is hard to do — humor, like horror and erotica, is a genre that works or doesn’t on the basis of the emotional effect it has on the reader, and if that effect is missing, no other virtues in the work will make up for its absence — and failed humor is flat and leaden, but accidental humor is downright embarrassing.

Two: being ambiguous. Artfully handled ambiguity can add richness and texture and layers of meaning to your story. All accidental ambiguity does is confuse your readers, who will not be happy with you any more. And no, you can’t get away with claiming after the fact that you did it on purpose when you really didn’t, because your readers can always tell.

Three: using internal rhyme and alliteration and other sound effects. This one’s especially tricky, because the same things done well and on purpose can be wonderful. What you don’t want is for your reader to think that those rhymes (or whatever) crept in while you weren’t watching, and that you didn’t notice them.

It’s the difference between looking in control of your medium and looking like it’s too much for you to handle.

Peeves of the Day

December 7, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Because deadlines make me peevish.

One: The past tense of tread is trod. Not treaded — trod.

Two: Even in its extended sense of “to inflict great damage,” decimate applies to countable things, like people, not to solid and singular things, like buildings. (In the strict sense, decimate refers to the old Roman punishment meted out when an entire military unit had done something disgraceful, like mutiny — lots were drawn, and one man in every ten was clubbed or stoned to death by his fellow-soldiers.)

Three: And the past tense of shine is shone.

So there.

Peeve of the Day

December 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 7 Comments

If you’re writing a story in the past tense — as most of us do — then events and actions that took place in the past of the story go into the past perfect tense. You know, the one with all the “haves” and “hads” in it.

If you’re writing a story in the present tense — not so common, but it happens sometimes — then you can put past events and actions into the simple past tense.

(What about all the verbs with all the “mights” and “shoulds” and “oughts” and stuff in them? Those are the so-called modal verbs, the ones that are principally responsible for the observation that looked at one way, English only has two verb tenses, but looked at another way, it has roughly thirty-odd. If you feel uncertain about dealing with them, your best bet is probably to find yourself a beta reader with a really good feel for language and prose style and run everything past him or her.)

Proverbially

November 15, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

One of the first bits of style-improvement advice most writers get is “eliminate your adverbs.”

Like most entry-level advice, it’s good right up to the point where you don’t need it any more, and after that it can hinder as much as it helps.

The thing is, most entry-level writers do have a tendency to rely on adverbs to fine-tune the descriptive power of their verbs, or to be placeholders for better words that they promise themselves they’ll think of later. (And sometimes they do think of the better words later, in the second or third draft, which is a sign that they’re not entry-level writers any more.) For those writers, “eliminate your adverbs” is a real and valid step toward improving and streamlining their prose. The act of going through their manuscripts and deleting all the words ending in -ly is, if nothing else, instructive — they see how little meaning is lost in that process, and how much force and directness is gained. They train themselves not to be compulsive adverbializers.

At that point, though, it’s time to stop, before they train themselves to be obsessive adverb eliminators — because adverbs, like all the other parts of speech, exist for a reason. Sometimes the only way to express a precise shade of meaning, or to give a sentence the exact rhythm that it needs, is by using a carefully chosen adverb.

(See “carefully”, above. Yeah.)