Dehyphenation

A Reuters report Sept. 21 told of the dehyphenization of about 16,000 expressions in the newly published Shorter Oxford Dictionary's Sixth Edition.

Some formerly hyphenated expressions lose their Oxford hyphen—e.g., hobby horse, ice cream and test tube; others become one word, such as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

The report appropriately prompted e-discussions, one of them started by Reuter alumnus Charles Frankel, who lives in the U.S.A., and including a current Reuterian Julie as well as Reutalumnus me, cm 10-10-07:

From: Charles, Monday, October 1, 2007 Subject: hyphens

Carl, When my wife's father died in the late 1960s, we inherited his third edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It has been a goldmine (gold-mine?) of information since; I consult it frequently. I will not be buying the sixth edition but I appreciate the articles on the disappearing hyphen. I still write "teen-age" with a hyphen because, at one time in my career, I was told teenage was some kind of fodder. I use a hyphen when it is useful.

But I do not know whether to describe the United States as fuckedup, fucked-up or fucked up. Whatever the answer, this country of mine is in a mess. --Chuck - - - - - - -

From: Carl, Fri, 05 Oct 2007 (amended 10 Oct 2007)

Chuck: My Concise Oxford is more modern than your third edition (1934), being a "Fourth Edition, 1951, Reprinted (with revised addenda) 1956." Its dark-blue (darkblue? dark blue?), cloth binding held together for many years with Scotch tape.

I also possess the so-called Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the two-volume word bible, a 1986 Reprint (“With Corrections”) of the 1944 Third Edition. It is a 2,700-page abridgement of the 15,000-page, primary Oxford Dictionary of 1879. It took seven Oxford U. abbreviators and three Leeds U. helpers 30 years to put together the first Shorter edition of 1933. (I acquired my Shorter 20 years ago at a bookshop sale in Maidstone, Kent, for 40 pounds/$100 Cdn.)

By the way, my Shorter gives 15 lines of definitions and usages of fuck, remarking of that word that it was "Until recently regarded as a taboo-word [now a tabooword?] and rarely recorded in print." It hyphenates "fuck-up. A mess. muddle."

My 50-year-old Concise Oxford has fuck all to say about fuck. --cm 5-10-07

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From: Chuck Saturday, October 6, 2007
Subject: Re: hyphens C O R R E C T I ON

Carl, Sorry, I got mixed up with "Concise" and "Shorter." I have the "Shorter"; make of that what you can. The cover of the first of my two volumes also is held together by Scotch tape. Perhaps we could make a fortune by figuring how we could stick hyphens to prefixes and suffixes.

My wife drives me somewhat crazy by using a single hyphen when she should use two of them for a dash - but no one is perfect. –Chuck

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From: Agnes, Tuesday, October 9, 2007
To: Carl, Chuck Subject: Re: hyphens

What about your Canadian Oxford Dictionary? What does it say? Agnes

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From: Chuck To: Agnes Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Agnes: It depends on how the Canadian dictionary pronounces a-bout. – Chuck

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From: Carl, Wed. 05 Oct 2007
Agnes and Chuck:

Good call, Agnes. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary of 1998, Editor-in-Chief Katharine Barber, 1,730 pages (Canadian English: 250 Years in the Making), may well be the bellwether in the Internetera dehyphenization movement, nine years ahead of the new Shorter.

Take a look, for example, at Canadian Oxford verbiage that precede Shorter’s changes: —e.g., hobby horse, ice cream, test tube and such combos as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

By the way, there is yet another Oxford dictionary hereabout (hereabout/hereabouts one word in all four of our Oxfordicts) -- namely, the encyclopedic Oxford Reference Dictionary, 1986, 994 pages. It’s a bit preWeb passé with its hobby-horse, ice-cream and test-tube along with bumble-bee, cry-baby and (no lowlifes allowed) leap-frog.

Chuck: As for the F-word, or is it Fword, its aforementioned absence from the Concise Oxford and a sparse 15 lines in the Shorter, the OxReference allows a meagre 5-1/2 lines, including your unhyphenated “fuck up—to mess.”

It gets down to this: The Canadian Oxford wins on the F-front handsdown, so to speak. It does fuck up in hyphenating the noun fuck-up (“a mess or disastrously bungled matter,” or “a person who is a chronic loser or failure”).

But it does provide a compendiously Canadian 18 usages as verb, noun, adverb, adjective and general expletive—including politely defining “fuckhead” as “a person considered with contempt.” --cm 10-10-09 #

From: Carl Thu, 11Oct 2007

This discussion of hyphens-or-not and Oxford dictionaries is in danger of becoming overdone, overworked and overwrought (all three over-words appear hyphenlessly in olden Oxfords).

Nevertheless, two important corrections are necessary:

First:

In referring Oct. 10 to Oxford dictionaries retained in this home, I cited four--the Concise, the Shorter, the Reference and the Canadian. Even while reporting that, a fifth rested before my eyes, a finger-reach from this iBook computer.

It is The Little Oxford Dictionary, a long-ago gift from my mother, its clothbound 638 pages little enough to fit into a trouser pocket. It is the dictionary I mainly use to check a spelling or a meaning. First published in 1930, mine is a 1951 reprint (“with Corrections and Revised Addenda”) of the 1944 Third Edition.

Just as the current Shorter Oxford editors accept the impact of Internet lingo in making their changes, the Little Oxford’s preface cites such influences of its time as “the wider spread of American books and journals; of cinema captions and of the new power of wireless. . . .”

Still, the Little one hyphenates bumble-bee, hobby-horse and ice-cream. There is no crybaby nor cry-baby, no test tube nor test-tube. It makes no mention of lowlife, although there is a citation of “lowbrow (slang) unintellectual.”

Perhaps with that in mind, there’s not an F-word to be seen.

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Second:

In naming the Editor-in Chief of the Canadian Oxford, I misspelled her first name.

It’s Katherine, not Katharine, Barber—a blasphemous typographical error in identifying a renowned Canadian lexicographer, despite her having been born closer to Cambridge than Oxford. (see following).
Apologetically, cm 11-10-07

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http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/cw2w3.cgi?p=banfield&t=42205&d=757
Katherine Patricia Mary BARBER
BARBER, Katherine Patricia Mary, B.A., M.A.; lexicographer; b. Ely, Cambridgeshire, England 1959; e. Univ.of Winnipeg B.A. 1980, B.A. (Hons.) 1986; Univ. of Ottawa M.A. 1990; EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, CANADIAN DICTIONARIES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CANADA 1991-- ; Lecturer, Sch. of Translation & Interpretation, Univ. of Ottawa 1984-91; Rsch. Assoc., Bilingual Cdn. Dictionary, Univ. of Ottawa 1989-91; Roman Catholic; Mem., Euralex (Eur. Assn. for Lexicography); Dictionary Soc. of N. Am.; Am. Dialect Soc.; Office: Don Mills, Ont. –Canadian Who’s Who 1997

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Barber
Katherine Barber From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Katherine Patricia Mary Barber (born 1959) is a Canadian lexicographer and Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree University of Winnipeg in 1980 and a Master of Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1990. From 1984 to 1991, she was a lecturer in the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research associate with the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary project at the University of Ottawa. In 1991, she was Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Dictionaries for the Oxford University Press in Canada.

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http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/702-6634910-8188051?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-ca&field-author=Katherine%20Barber
Books "Katherine Barber" Showing 1 - 12 of 18 Results
1. Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Jun 30 2004)
2. Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation by Katherine Barber (Paperback Feb 2006)
3. Paperback Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Paperback - Mar 2006)
4. Only in Canada You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Mar 15 2007)
5. Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso,and Tom Howell (Paperback - May 2005)
6. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Aug 8 2007)
7. Oxford Canadian Thesaurus of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Paperback - Oct 2006)
8. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something To Do With Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Paperback – Mar 07)
9. Compact Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Hardcover - Nov 2006)
10. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Hrdcvr - Mar06)
11. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - May 2004)
12. Concise Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Oct 2005)

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Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

By Simon Rabinovitch

LONDON, Sept 21, 2007 (Reuters Life!) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem with that, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from the year 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
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Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf hobby horse ice cream pin money pot belly test tube water bed
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Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee chickpea crybaby leapfrog logjam lowlife pigeonhole waterborne #

Maspilling

In case you missed, thought you-all in the J-game, past or present, might be amused and/or surprised, as per moi, by this attached NooYark Sundae Tames piece by NYT Public Editor Clare Hoit on Miss Spelling of Names.

The frequnecy of that sin in that paper he reports is amazing, methought.

I'm still wondering whether the writer--or proof reader--might have misspelled any of the many names cited therein, provoking correction in the Times on Monday.

A bit near the end of the piece reminds this reader that when teaching eons ago at Carleton University J-school in Ottawa, a misspelled name in a student's story required an automatic failure mark. It could be awkward conveying such info to a faulting student whose name I couldn't spell. . . .

Another personal anecdote the Timespiece prompts: My first bylined piece at Reuters appeared prominently in the Washington Post--"By Carol Moolins."

(The tearsheet is somewhere in the basement.)

-cm 12-8-07

New York Times August 12, 2007

THE PUBLIC EDITOR

So Many Names, So Many Corrections

By Clark Hoyt

WHEN Michele Sugg, a clinical social worker from Branford, Conn., saw a friend’s name misspelled in The New York Times last month, she immediately asked for a correction.

Sugg’s friend was Stevie Ray Vaughan, the great blues guitarist. Years ago, Sugg worked at the Yale Psychiatric Institute with teenagers fighting drug and alcohol problems, and she said Vaughan was an inspiration to her patients. He had been a hard-core user who got sober, and he wrote encouraging notes to the kids.

But he has been dead for 17 years, so why get bothered now if The Times calls him Vaughn instead of Vaughan?

“One’s name is a part of one,” Sugg said. “It’s who you are. Even in death you want to be represented correctly.”

The fact is, The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate — famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

The Times has given Gen. Douglas MacArthur the middle initial A at least 25 times since 1987, though he had no middle name and didn’t use A, B, C or S, all of which have been ascribed to him.

So, you ask, what’s the big deal? Doesn’t The Times have more important things to worry about, like getting it right on Iraq and Iran and the presidential campaign?

Yes, a great newspaper has to get the big things right, but it also has to pay fanatical attention to thousands of details every day to prevent the kinds of mistakes that start readers wondering, “If they can’t spell his name right, what else is wrong with the story?”

Or, as Joe Lelyveld said in 2000, when he was executive editor of The Times, “When it comes to accuracy issues, tolerance and the larger view can be dangerous to our health.”

At a retreat of senior editors of The Times, Lelyveld called on them to “sweat the small stuff.” He bemoaned “the malignancy of misspelled names,” pointing out, among other things, that The Times had misspelled the first name of Madeleine Albright, who was then secretary of state, 49 times, despite running three corrections.

Unfortunately, the cancer appears to be getting worse. When Lelyveld spoke in
mid-September, there had been 198 corrections for misspelled names in The Times so far that year. Through yesterday, still in early August, there had been 269 this year. And the mistakes keep coming.

Monday’s corrections column on Page 2 contained three items that reflect helpless exasperation on the part of editors responsible for maintaining The Times’s high standards.

One noted that The Times had misspelled the name of Neiman Marcus, the department store, in at least 195 articles since 1930, most recently on July 21, in an obituary.

Another said that the name Willkie in the law firm of Willkie, Farr & Gallagher has been misspelled in at least 50 articles since 1958. It had happened again the previous Friday, in Business Day. The writer had dropped one of the two l’s in Willkie, who was Wendell L. Willkie, Franklin Roosevelt’s challenger in 1940.

But the killer was a correction for an article that ran the previous week, misspelling Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s last name for the 14th time since 2001, when he became White House counsel, including four earlier instances this year alone.

How could this one have happened, given that an editor in the Washington bureau, which has been responsible for 13 of the 14 mistakes, had recently sent colleagues a note of caution titled, “Do you know how to spell Gonzales?”

The latest misspelling appeared on Aug. 1. James Risen, a veteran national security affairs writer, said he was pushing deadline, typing fast and just got it wrong, typing Gonzalez, not Gonzales. “I should have gotten it right,” he said. “It was my fault, not the desk’s.”

The mistake was caught and corrected before the article was sent to New York. But the misspelling also appeared in two paragraphs that had been deleted for space reasons, so nobody fixed that part of the electronic copy.

Late in the evening, shortly before 11, editors decided that those two paragraphs needed to appear in the article because of competitive pressure: The Washington Post was putting the same information on Page 1. Susan Keller, the Washington bureau’s night editor, opened up the story, restored the paragraphs, then had to find other cuts to make room. The clock was ticking. An 11:30 deadline was approaching, other editors still had to read the article, and in her haste, Keller didn’t notice Gonzales’s name misspelled three times in the paragraphs she had put back.

In New York, time stamps indicate the story was opened at 11:10 p.m. and 11:12 p.m., and sent to type right on deadline at 11:30. Nobody noticed the errors. The spell-check in The Times’s electronic editing system does not flag either Gonzales or Gonzalez.

Keller was mortified by the error. She was the editor who had sent colleagues the note about Gonzales. “I guess it didn’t work,” she said.

I asked Greg Brock, the senior editor in charge of corrections, why he thinks so many names are misspelled in the paper, especially when The Times has so many layers of editing. In theory, every article is read by at least five people after a reporter finishes it, though stories written or changed for later editions often get far fewer checks.

Brock said that when he looks into mistakes he gets several common responses:

Reporters say they were operating from memory and didn’t bother to check. That’s what one writer said after misspelling the name of Julianna Margulies, the television actress.

Reporters assume that a name is spelled the “normal” way and don’t check. That’s what happened with the obituary of Neal Shine, the former publisher of The Detroit Free Press, whose first name was not Neil, as it appeared in the paper. Shine hired me in 1968, when he was the city editor of The Free Press, and he would get infuriated by errors like this.

Reporters checking names on the Internet are carelessly misled by other people’s misspellings.

Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor in charge of standards, has another theory. “Their minds are on higher things,” he said. “They’re looking at the bigger story, and they think they can’t bother with details like that.” Besides, he added, they expect misspellings “will be caught on the copy desk.”

Is there anything that can be done to cure the problem? The Times has started keeping an electronic record of misspelled names, including the name of the staffer — spelled correctly — responsible for each error. I’d take another step to try to prevent more of the mistakes by creating a database of the most commonly misspelled names, so that editors are automatically flagged when they appear in copy. It’s Steven Spielberg, not Stephen.

Finally, my wife, a deputy managing editor at USA Today, had a journalism professor at Arizona State University who gave an automatic F to any class assignment that included a misspelled name.

The Times can’t do that, but maybe another kind of writing assignment is in order. How about requiring a personal letter of apology from the person responsible for an error to the person whose name is misspelled?

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company