Month: January 2009

Hyphenation book in the works

Hyphens

Proper hyphenation seems to have become a somewhat-lost art form in American English.

I have blogged several times about hyphens.

Because this has been such a recurring topic in my blog, I decided last month to write a book about it.

The book is tentatively titled “XX Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens”.

I have not finalized “XX” because I am still identifying all of the common mistakes.

But I can tell you already that “XX” will be greater than fifteen.

I am working on organizing the book around clusters or categories of mistakes.

Every documented type of mistake will include multiple examples of the mistake, solutions for those examples, and explanations about why something is a mistake and how to avoid it.

I am announcing the book today so that you can keep an eye out for the official announcement that the book has been published.

In the mean time, if you have a question about hyphenation, then please contact me. I will review your question and make sure that I answer it — generally, if not specifically — in the book.

Thanks!

By the way: I promise to NEVER trade, rent or sell your email address to any third party online or offline. Period!

UPDATE: My How to Use Hyphens book is now available in softcover and several eBook editions. Learn more here!

“… inspections that were never finalled …”

Adjectives, Nouns, Verbs

I saw this yesterday in a letter.

Problem:
The word “final” is not a verb.

Explanation:
The letter came from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Division.

The full sentence was “Also, you may have outstanding inspections that were never finalled on this project as listed below.”

The problem with this sentence is that “final” is a noun or an adjective, but never a verb.

So one cannot “final a project”, and therefore one cannot use “final” as a verb in passive voice, either.

It is ironic that the next sentence in the letter contained the correct verb.

For fun, I searched Google for “finalled” (with the quotation marks, to avoid matches for such phrases as “final LED”) and got about 6,230 matches.

This indicates that very people are making the mistake made by in the form letter from the City of Houston Code Enforcement Division.

Solution:
“… inspections that were never finalized …”

“Verklempt”

Adjectives

This is one of my favorite words.

An article at Wikipedia identifies the adjective “verklempt” as a Yiddish word used by English-speaking Jews.

I know very little Yiddish, but I love this word because it describes in two syllables a very specific state that humans experience.

The adjective “verklempt” means choked or overcome with emotion or (emotionally) stuck.

“The standing ovation made me verklempt.” is a good example of how to use this adjective.

If you have never heard this word, of if you do not know that Yiddish words are generally pronounced like German words and do not know how to pronounce German words, then you probably will mispronounce it.

The correction pronunciation — in pseudo-phonetics — is “fair-klempt”.

The Wikipedia article says that the Yiddish adjective “verklempt” — with an M-P-T on the end — is derived from the German adjective “verklemmt” — with an M-M-T on the end.

Whether you prefer “verklempt” or “verklemmt”, consider adding it to your vocabulary.

You might be surprised by how useful this adjective will become to you.