Comments on: Chocolate Covered or Chocolate-Covered?

By: Sarah Turner

Sarah Turner — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:46:42 +0000

Email is more often than not written without the hyphen. At least in the UK. Although The Times still uses e-mail. Other electronic things haven’t quite made the jump yet: e-newslettters or eNewsletters, e-shots, e-book or eBook. But I think in time they will.

The Web and The Internet and now often seen without their caps: web and internet. And Web site is now only one word: website. It’s progress I guess!

By: mand

mand — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:09:15 +0000

@24. Miriam – Funny, i do write tshirt!

@22. Gab – I think i agree with you overall. Of course bumblebee has been around longer even than mother-in-law, at least i’d guess so.

The point about pronunciation of e-book, with two stressed syllables, hadn’t occurred to me and is a good one. 80)

I’m sure this is an ‘argument’ (of the least agressive kind) that no one will win. ;0)

By: Miriam

Miriam — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:45:18 +0000

We write e-mail because that’s how it’s pronounced! We wouldn’t write bmovie or tshirt.

By: PreciseEdit

PreciseEdit — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:43:55 +0000

Interesting. The double hyphen I typed was formatted as a dash. In any case, both occurrences should be en dashes.

By: Gab

Gab — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:54:25 +0000

My take on where to put the hyphens is that you generally need them when you’re making up a new expression, but that it makes sense to take a more descriptive view when you’re using an established expression, which means taking into account that some of these tend to be used with hyphens, some without and some either way!

An expression might be more established because it’s an official term like “mother-in-law”, or because the expression created really derives a new noun rather than describes one referent of the noun . That’s a clunky way to express it, forgive me, but what I mean is that “bumblebee” denotes a creature within a particular subclass of the category bees, whereas “buzzing bee” describes a creature from the category of bees that happens to be buzzing, it doesn’t create a subclass.

I don’t see any point in resisting this kind of language change – we wouldn’t bother trying to separate expressions like “farewell” or “welcome”, so why try to re-insert hyphens when newer expressions become so common that we no longer need the hyphen to explain what the nouns are doing in that position in a sentence?

People have mentioned e-mail/email and e-book/ebook. Firstly, email has been around longer than e-books have, so perhaps people are more comfortable with “email” becoming a word in its own right by now, rather than a contraction. Secondly, the phonetics/phonology of “email” lends itself better to treating this as one word, whereas “e-book” tends to be pronounced with two stressed syllables, keeping them separate, so it seems less likely that the hyphen will be lost in this case.

My point is that it doesn’t make sense to stick fanatically to one set of rules when the changes happen on a case-by-case basis, depending on all sorts of things about the expression involved. In the examples above, I’m suggesting that semantic (bumblebee), contextual/usage (mother-in-law) and phonological factors (email/e-book), can all be important, but not necessarily for the same expressions.