Why punctuation is practical, why spelling is important, and why legibility is necessary. That’s how we roll…

Discovered over at The Rut.

However, it’s a different kind of game when dealing with foreign words in english — I have learned that, wherever possible, hyphenated forms of Japanese terms should be avoided. Instead, we’ve aimed to treat the hyphenated word as a single compound word. This is because we, in the West, have a strange understanding of kanji as a written language, which has led to the improper usage of the hyphen within the various transliterations.

The concept of placing two or more representational characters together to form a new word or idea, is no different than stringing letters of an alphabet together to form new words. We don’t write “w-o-r-d-s” on a page, neither do the Japanese use hyphens to connect multiple kanji together to form words.

Regardless, right or wrong, the hyphen has become ubiquitous in english when faced with non-romanized characters! Let’s get rid of it, I say! Well, we are making good strides — according to the Quill & Quire’s blog—about 16,000 hyphens have been eliminated in the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a scaled-down version of the 20-volume OED, The New York Times reports.

What’s getting the heave are most hyphens linking the halves of a compound noun. Some, like “ice cream,” “fig leaf,” “hobby horse” and “water bed,” have been fractured into two words, while many others, like “bumblebee,” “crybaby” and “pigeonhole,” have been squeezed into one.

Check out the excerpt here.

What I’m concerned with today is not so much usage, but typographical considerations. Found this passage on Wikipedia which dealt with the typography of the ellipsis nicely and that I wanted to share with all:

According to Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, the details of typesetting ellipses depend on the character and size of the font being set and the typographer’s preference. Bringhurst writes that a full space between each dot is “another Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is much too wide” — he recommends using flush dots, or thin-spaced dots (up to one-fifth of an em), or the prefabricated ellipsis character (Unicode U+2026, Latin entity …). Bringhurst suggests that normally an ellipsis should be spaced fore-and-aft to separate it from the text, but when it combines with other punctuation, the leading space disappears and the other punctuation follows.

Bringhurst provides the following examples:

• i … j
• k….
• l…, l
• l, … l
• m…?
• n…!

It’s interesting to note that, while up to this point in time the ellipsis has been utilized to note dropped words, phrases or sentences, online it often indicates that more information is on its way (ie ‘Read more…’).

• Augur (the verb—ie to foretell) is from Middle English, derived from Latin and has Indo-European roots.
• Auger (the noun—ie a drill) is also from Middle English, but is an alteration of the word ‘nauger’, which is derived from Old English rather than latin—see nafog�?r, auger.

From the Eggcorn database:

The verb “augur�? ‘foretell’ occurs in modern English with any frequency only in the idiom “augur well/badly (for)�?, so it’s ripe for respelling with the verb “auger�?, related to the noun denoting a boring tool (though “auger�? is itself a rather specialized word — just not as specialized as “augur�?). The references treat this as a simple spelling error, and it might well be; the question is whether some people who use it think that boring is somehow involved in the meaning, perhaps though current states of affairs boring, metaphorically, into the future.

Certainly, the “auger�? spelling is common: on 10 April 2005, I got ca. 12,400 raw Google web hits for “augers well for�?, a respectable number in comparison to ca. 63,500 for “augurs well for�?.

As of today (May 14, 2007) I get ca. 41,300 raw google hits for “augers well for” — vs ca. 248,00 for “augurs well for�?. So it seems that the ratio has been maintained.

The above, of course, is an ‘auger’.

“The word contronym (also the synonym antagonym) is used to refer to words that, by some freak of language evolution, are their own antonyms. Both contronym and antagonym are neologisms; however, there is no alternative term that is more established in the English language”

Off the top of my head, a lot of phrasl verbs are like this, ie “give out”. The site mentioned above provides the example of “wind up”, meaning “to end” or to “start up” (eg a watch).

Some examples:

• dollop—a large amount vs a small amount
• dust—add fine particles vs remove fine particles
• table—propose (in the UK) vs set aside (in the US)
• strike—hit vs miss (in baseball)

Check out the list here.