Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why Does Moby-Dick Sometimes Have a Hyphen? (2015)

smithsonianmag.com

35 pointsTomte19 comments

English hyphens are kind of one of the world's worst language features of all time. They're supposed to indicate when two words are being joined together, until people get tired of using the extra symbol and then just drop it altogether and mush the words together into a proper Germanic compound word.

This can happen incredibly fast in linguistic terms -- anybody remember "e-mail"?

Since compounding words happens naturally in English grammar, hyphenation is some weirdo vestigial hangover from the times before English was written with spaces and the "rules" are entirely arbitrary and up to whatever style guide you happened to have studied in school.

In some bizarre twist of fate, hyphenation is on the decline and instead of just compounding two words together like any decent Germanic language, some style guides are encouraging people to keep the words separated with spaces, coming a full 180 degrees from the original use of a mark to compound words for clarity in texts made without spaces.

Is it "on-line", "on line", "online", how about "log-in", "log in", "login"?

It shouldn't go beyond notice that the hyphen seems to exist as a way to prevent compounding in the proper Germanic way, but isn't needed at all for Latin or Greek based compounds or neologisms.

Language prescriptivists can make a real mess of things and really screw the languages up for the rest of us. Trying to Romanize English was a terrible idea.

I agree with much of what you said, but this:

> "log in", "login"?

Is a bad example, because these two have taken on two slightly different meanings: the spaced version is the verb, and the single word version is the noun.

It also turns out that English tolerates noun/verb homophones just fine, the orthography doesn't change the pronunciation at all and it doesn't really matter in this case.

You sound like you know more about this than I do, but I find login as a verb distasteful and believe such usage should be avoided. What would you do for the past tense? You'll decompose the word to its natural verb, log, and write logged in.

Also, I, for one, still favor e-mail, but I'm definitely in the minority there.

I think the problem I have more is that most of this business hinders communication by trying to establish rules that are orthogonal to the language -- usually with some kind of prestige agenda towards Romanticizing English. Hyphens to compound words were simply a convenience and clarification mark for a time before we used spaces. We use spaces now, hence we don't need hyphens anymore to compound words.

What we do need is a more reasonable set of conventions that are well harmonized with the mechanics of the language.

e.g. Shall we use "login" as a verb? Then we're going to get verb tenses like "logined" and "logining". Are we, collectively, okay with that? Then fine, we'll use that.

If we don't like that then we won't compound the words in the verb usage and continue on with "logged in" and "logging in".

But then we'll have this weird case where the verb "log" almost always means "to keep a record of", except when followed by "in" or "out". But languages tend to not like this kind of exceptionalism and we'll probably be in a state where we keep evaluating just compounding them and applying the existing tensing rules.

Personally I prefer sign in over log in. Partially because to sign seems to carry a stronger connection to the intended meaning, to authenticate, than to log does.

It’s the same metaphor—you’re signing the (virtual) logbook to get in.

Good point, it is the same metaphor, but signing is the essential action. What do you do with the log book? You sign it.

Another reason I prefer sign in is because there's less discord about its usage. I have never seen anyone try to write signin. Maybe they'll hyphenate it, but even then people seem less inclined to use sign-in as a verb compared to login.

My general rule (I don't remember where I picked it up. Maybe the Chicago Manual of Style?) is that the verb form is that the hyphenated or single-word form is the noun or adjective, and the unhyphenated form is the verb.

- He will log in to the system.

- What's your login?

- Please sign in.

- That's the sign-in table over there.

Along these lines, does the button/link describe the action (click the button to log in) or the type of button (the login button).

The question of whether to to use sign in or log in is separate.

I go back and forth on prescriptivist vs descriptivist versions of language, though at the end of the day, languages that are in use change. I think it makes sense to create the equivalent of a stylebook for a publication or site so that there's consistent usage (prescriptivist), but understand that there are going to be inconsistencies across the use of language as a whole (descriptivist).

But they are pronounced differently—they have different stress. (In English, stressed syllables are generally louder, longer, and higher-pitched than unstressed syllables.) In “log in”, both syllables are stressed, while in “login”, only the first is. Compare “every day” and “everyday”.

There are some exceptions, for example:

Back up, back-up and backup all have legitimate differences to me.

Back up, something has returned to a prior state. (to) Back-up, verb. Backup, noun, copies of files.

If I were to say those to you, would you be able to tell the difference?

Since the answer is probably no (I say all three of them the same), and you can understand the difference in speech when words are flying at you at a 150 words per minute, why is it necessary to have three distinct ways of writing homophone when you have all the time in the world to figure out the context?

Yes.

If you think you say them the same either you are unaware of the subtleties of your own speech or you speak very strangely.

There are very obvious differences in tone, spacing, and emphasis between "back up" and "backup". "up" gets the emphasis on the former, "back" gets emphasis on the latter which is much shorter without a pause between syllables. I don't know that I agree with the parent about back-up.

There are significant differences communicating through writing, communicating by voice only (phone), and communicating face to face.

Both writing and in-person communicating add quite a lot of bandwidth for information compared to voice-only. Face to face there is a dynamic conscious and unconscious physical communicating going on, and writing – similarly – adds nuance with language features that are either very subtle in speech or not present at all.

Speech isn't the language standard that writing aims to copy – they're separate and there's no requirement that each have every feature of the other.

Very likely, but then again, most people filter out mistakes/diffrences due to accents, etc. automatically when people speak, so it proves little.

b'ak 'up. b'ak'up. b'akup. difference is slight, but present. Just like writer and rider, there is a very slight but perceptible difference, the d/t not withstading [though, admittedly, for some people they are indeed homophones.]

So when I finish a book, I'll occasionally switch over to Moby Dick while I figure out what book to start next. Over the course of like a year, I've made it past the 50% point.

It's honestly a terrible book. The author is more obsessed with whales than his characters. There are entire chapters dedicated to whether whales are fish. Other chapters that describe every tiny detail about the whaling industry.

I mean I guess it's good if you want to understand historical whaling. But it's hardly an enjoyable read.

There's a big different between "a[n objectively] terrible book" and "not something I like".

I agree with the details thing but the idea is that in between the details is where he muses on philosophical and human ideas. This twitter account that posts interesting lines from the book cuts to the chase: https://twitter.com/mobydickatsea

WTF with the auto playing video on mobile when you scroll down? I guess I'll be avoiding smithsonianmag links...

TLDR: We don't know

...and, let's face it, nobody cares. Move on, dear reader.

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