Re: OT: interestin' factoids (mostly language-related)

Roger Mills wrote:

> >> >Exstewardesses?>
> >>         I do believe a hyphen is required.
> Tom Wier wrote:
> > I disagree.  If a morpheme is a fully fledged derivational morpheme, and
> > not just a clitic like <'s> nor a compound in a compound word, then why
> > hyphenate
>
> I suspect usage is changing as we speak.  Seems to me Safire has weighed in
> on this question many a time in his column. (But can't recall whether he's
> pro or con whatever the Good Gray Times demands.)  Use/non-use of hyphens
> may be a (gasp!) generational thing.......
>
> co-conspirator? co-defendant? ex-lover? ex-dictator? non-conforming?
> non-living?
I think you're right, but I'm not sure which generation is doing it.  One
would presume Gen-Xers, but it's hard to say.  Right now, I'm reading
_From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life_
by Jacques Barzun, a nonagenerian historian who used to teach at
Columbia.  I was verily shocked today when I found him, apparently,
using forms like <quasi independent>, with not even a hyphen*.  This
might make sense in Latin, where <quasi> was a free morpheme, but it's
not in English.  I much prefer agglutinated forms like <quasiindependent>,
or at least <quasi-independent>.   A case could be made that <ex-> is
now a free morpheme (as when people talk of their "exes"), but certainly
not <co-> or <non->.  Those are never used as independent words, which
is our criterion here.

*(I suppose it's possible that Barzun's editor is responsible for that use.)

> I've been taken to task for making the possessive of names ending in -s with
> the simple apostrophe-- Mills' theory, Geurtjens' dictionary, Mr. Roberts'
> rank..... which I think is OK in British usage.  Or am I wrong on all counts?
Your use of <s'> for the plural possessive was the way I was taught
in middleschool and highschool a decade ago, so I presume it's current
American usage, in at least some places.  Personally, depending on which
register I'm using, I switch between /mIlz/ and /mIlz@z/ for formal and
informal speech respectively, so I sometimes reflect that distinction in
my writing.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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