Some people collect teapots. Others collect cacti. I used to collect stamps from the Indian Princely States but these days I am more likely to collect dust. My friend Professor Walter Gratzer collects unintentionally funny newspaper headlines. Notable entries from World War II include
MACARTHUR FLIES BACK TO FRONT
and (my favourite)
EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS.
The world of science makes its contribution to random mirth, with
SCIENTISTS MAKE GORILLAS PREGNANT
and this one, which I spotted on BBC online:
EXPLODING STAR HUNTERS MAKE HISTORY
This last is silly because it lacks a hyphen (and even if it didn’t, it would still look odd). Hyphens, like commas, are among those tiny things we take for granted, those things that separate a world of peace and order from the crawling chaos in which anarchy rules, and Great Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath goat of the woods and the Piping Shuggoths of the Blind Idiot God Nyarlathotep squish wetly up from the basement to bite our heads off.
Over on the What’s Wrong forum (itself a title of surreally exiguous punctuation) Jennifer Rohn has been agitating for the ability to have tags that recognize hyphens in the way we’re meant to understand them – as signs used to group two formerly separate concepts into one single, new one – and to prevent unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding. And isn’t science all about being as precise as we can about concepts, in as elegant and concise a way as possible?
Naw, I’m just in science for the buckets of money and god-like power.
You forgot those camp followers, Henry!
I’m a fan of Kenneth Williams, who died twenty years ago today. Does that make me a camp-follower, or just a camp follower?
And, referring to the comments on organs, how about the well-tempered clavier?
Re: Kenneth Williams, for that construction you need to introduce the possessive “of” and give up on the hyphen.
Er… that makes me camp, either way, doesn’t it. Confused…
Ooh, I couldn’t resist it
@Graham – you can find my heartfelt tribute here
@Richard: Naw, I’m just in science for the buckets of money and god-like power. At Nature we usually just settle for the God-like power.
and I thought you were doing out of the kindness of your heart.
Is Nyarlathotep a Blind Idiot God, a Blind-Idiot God, or a Blind Idiot-God?
@Richard: Yes, well, that’s what we always say…
@Bob: Probably Blind, Idiot God, but the comma is silent like the ‘p’ in pswimming.
On the subject of usage, or, as it might be, abusage, I was sent this picture by a Mr K. Ziemelis of Finchley.
If my book editors are anything to go by, I’m afraid we have to blame US influence for the enfeebling attack on the hypen, as they keep taking them out when I put them in my books.
What’s worse, the two words hyphen-free (or should I say hyphen free) or that most lovely of forms the elided word pair (HyphenFree).
Love the picture, but as I feel about hamsters much as you do about kittens, I feel the urge to go alright! Alright! ALRIGHT!
But as old punctuational marks slide into oblivion, new ones arise. The Grocers’ Apostrophe, as in Lovely Fresh Apple’s Today, has morphed into the Klingon Apostrophe, as in Hear’Say. How did that happen? Invented by some cretin in advertising .
I saw an intriguing example of the Grocers’ Apostrophe today – a handwritten notice advertising pens, written pen’s. The style of the handwriting meant that the apostrophe was elongated downwards substantially… you’re way ahead of me.
In German you can just make a new word out of varios nouns. Like e.g. the dirt that a blackboard sponge makes could be blackboardspongedirt. (Tafelschwammdreck). Not that this is a word many people would use, but you could use it. likewise you could have starhunters or explodingstars.
I maintain that the greatest contribution that J. W. von Goethe made to culture was not his recognition of the homology of parts in plants; not Faust; not his romantically dotty theory of light; but his coinage of the word Weltanschauung. Genius. I still don’t know what it means, though.
@Sabine: I remember seeing a list of fake German motoring terms once. The one that stands out was Flippenflappenmuckenschpredden (windscreen wipers).
I’ve also driven on a fantastic mountain road in Bavaria called the Grossglocknerhochalpenstrasse. I love the German language.
:-) Yeah, it’s one of the nicer features of the German language, though it must be confusing for the non native speaker. Another thing that’s useful is the possibility to make a noun out of every verb. E.g. ‘sein’ (to be) can also be a noun ‘Sein’ which could maybe be translated as ‘existence’ or so.
“Weltanschauung” means something like world-view, in a philosophical sense. It’s like the overall attitude you have towards life and us humans on this planet. You’ll commonly say things like: This is a very pessimistic/optimistic Weltanschauung.
For anecdotal purposes, the French have been adding unnecessary apostrophes to all sorts of words for the last ten years or so. The cheap train tickets called Prem’s come immediately to mind. Now I think of it, these abuses do tend to be imposed by marketing agencies thinking that they are being original.
You must have enjoyed Eats Shoots and Leaves
.
One Potato.
Two Potato.
Three Potato.
May the Fourth be with you.
@Brian, who said “I’m afraid we have to blame US”.
Them’s fighting words. (Or is it Thems?) I am mortally offended, sir. I was the one who started the whole hyphen pillow fight over on the whinge forum in the first place!
Not very fighting, honest. It’s merely an observation on the different habits of US book editors, who tend to take hyphens out, and UK book editors, who tend to put them in… but then people in publishing are weird anyway. (Now managing to offend all those people out there who work for Nature. I am doing well.)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves – a classic from which I learned a lot, only showing up my total lack of formal grammatical training. Oooh, I feel another blog coming on… and that will be fighting talk.
Around here we use the grammatically correct “themmer fightin’ words.”