Showing posts with label dictionary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dictionary. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Around the Blogs
I’ve been meaning to note the arrival of a couple of new bloggers, both ACES members. Kathy Schenck has been offering Words to the Wise for a couple of months. She was Johnny on the spot, noting National Dictionary Day on Tuesday, which, I admit, had escaped my attention, and she makes note of the word of the day feature at her paper, The Journal Sentinel.
And Mark Murphy, copy editor and published author, has just started Murphy’s Craw, which promises “Some whimsical wanderings through the worlds of words, writing, and old movies and TV -- along with selected short subjects.”
Also, Language Hat uncovers some good postings and sites, finding Free Rice, which provides a vocabulary quiz and donates rice, and a good posting about spelling, at OUP.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Hyphen Hiatus
Well,notahiatus.Actually,they’vebeenbanished.
You get the idea.
A couple of days ago, our esteemed colleague Bill Walsh was fuming about the decision of Copy Editor magazine to change its name to Copyediting. As always, Bill has some choice things to say.
Now there's this: The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary did away with about 16,000 hyphens.
Russell Smith says:
There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating. Electronic communication tends to be more streamlined: We use punctuation less, generally, in e-mails and text messages, and in advertising slogans.
Furthermore, as the editor of the dictionary admitted to a Reuters reporter, the world of letters is increasingly ruled by designers. Type looks so much prettier, so much slicker, when it is not prickly with hyphens. It's easier to lay out words in narrow columns, too, when they are easily separable.
Some of us are not coöperating. Or co:operating. (Remember THAT one?)
You get the idea.
A couple of days ago, our esteemed colleague Bill Walsh was fuming about the decision of Copy Editor magazine to change its name to Copyediting. As always, Bill has some choice things to say.
Now there's this: The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary did away with about 16,000 hyphens.
Russell Smith says:
There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating. Electronic communication tends to be more streamlined: We use punctuation less, generally, in e-mails and text messages, and in advertising slogans.
Furthermore, as the editor of the dictionary admitted to a Reuters reporter, the world of letters is increasingly ruled by designers. Type looks so much prettier, so much slicker, when it is not prickly with hyphens. It's easier to lay out words in narrow columns, too, when they are easily separable.
Some of us are not coöperating. Or co:operating. (Remember THAT one?)
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