Timeline for Is a lengthy combination of words with hyphens like “the worst not-technically-in-a-recession year in American history” a new fashion of writing?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
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| May 3 at 20:16 | comment | added | Anton Sherwood | I have yet to meet another native speaker who shares my distaste for on-the-job training, in-depth reporting, at-will employment and so on, versus training on the job. I believe the phrase the full-faith-and-credit clause has appeared in decisions of the US Supreme Court. | |
| Sep 13, 2023 at 16:30 | comment | added | Mitch | @YoichiOishi My assessment is that this hyphenation practice is not standard at all, is very very informal, would be given a very poor grade in an assignment, but is still used by people. I don't think it is new, but it may be new that it is appearing more often in print. | |
| Oct 3, 2012 at 7:26 | comment | added | Yoichi Oishi | By high number of views and up-votes which I did not expect, I came to think a lengthy string of hyphenated-words as in the quoted case is not very usual or neat way of writing, and I don’t need to emulate it in my writing. If Q-R-X-Y-Z-noun style notation is granted for the currency or ubiquity, users of this site wouldn’t much care this question. | |
| Oct 3, 2012 at 5:13 | history | edited | MetaEd | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Oct 2, 2012 at 19:53 | vote | accept | Yoichi Oishi | ||
| Oct 1, 2012 at 12:59 | comment | added | Mitch | @Jim: yes, I agree that my rewording is not the best, but it is an attempt at getting both a 'standard' expression and one that captures as much as possible the exact meaning of the article's expression. | |
| Oct 1, 2012 at 12:55 | comment | added | Mitch | @RussellMcMahon: I think you have overspecialized the explanation of this particular usage. Yes, it is often used for scare quotes, as it is in this instance (and sarcasm is often a trope used in these op-ed columns), but the hyphenated sequence is also often used in other circumstances, mostly for stylistic variation and can signal informality or stream-of-consciousness writing. | |
| Oct 1, 2012 at 4:39 | comment | added | Russell McMahon | Mitch - I'd like to politely suggest that you have missed the point of tjhe construct used. It is a very purposeful construction not meant to get around lack of adjectives or to create a new one - it's main aim is to say that the description draws a long bow / isn't really true / beggars credibility / is a misuse of stats / is known by all to be essentially false. | |
| Oct 1, 2012 at 2:45 | comment | added | Jim | I think the "not technically in a recession" in your "standard and straightforward" rewrite gets a bit lost. I might say, "...2012 might turn out to be the worst year in modern American history of those not technically in a recession." | |
| Oct 1, 2012 at 1:41 | history | edited | Mitch | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Oct 1, 2012 at 1:32 | history | answered | Mitch | CC BY-SA 3.0 |