How to use (or not use) a hyphen
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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!)
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.
I'd be aghast if a double hyphen was the house style for a major news outlet.
Why do you insult my Underwood? It has not harmed you.
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.
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?
I thing “gmail” is the counter example.
For it to be a counterexample, it would have to have occurred naturally at first and then lost the hyphen.
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.
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.
I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked.
In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change.
Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words.
E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
> Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French.
I’ve known some (English) people who very much are and go out of their way to use Germanic roots instead. When they can, because it’s hard to avoid using ~a third of your language’s vocabulary. When they cannot, they pretend it’s Norman anyway.
I guess there will always be someone, even 900 years after the fact :)
(Just to clarify, I don't mean to imply those people you know are like that, just something that I'm reminded of.)
> A note on email versus e-mail
> Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero” and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, “email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)
[1]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
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.
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.
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...
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
It's not an initialism, not three separate letters, and definitely not S.O.S.
It replaced the earlier CQD. The Titanic transmitted both because SOS had only recently been adopted.
> 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.
All the more reason not to have jarring capitalisation and weird circles.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but Latex does this pretty well (“mastered” is a bit fuzzy I guess).
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.
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.
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...
-Gluten free
-Sugar free
-Fat free
-Dairy free
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...?!
I would like to introduce the interrobang: ‽
?!: 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?
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.
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.
"Eats Shoots and Leaves" is surely the canonical apostrophe rant.
I think the best takedown of this hilariously bad screed is here:
I agree that it's snobby; but I still enjoy her poke at "Carrot's £1" - 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].