Imperatives

“Thank-You For Your Business!”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Imperatives

My wife and I saw this at the bottom of an invoice a few weeks ago.

Beyond noticing that the preposition “For” should not have been capitalized, we both had a gut reaction to the hyphen in “Thank-You”.

The reaction was that the hyphenated form of the imperative “Thank You” felt like something that we used to see a few decades ago.

Of course, she or I today would use the hyphenated “Thank-You” when those two words together modify a noun, as in “Thank-You Cards”.

But neither of us would hyphenate “Thank You” when using those two words as an imperative (in, say, a headline).

I saw no matches when I searched Google for the use of the hyphenated “thank-you” as an imperative, but I admit that it was not a very deep search.

What I now wonder is whether the hyphenated imperative form in my wife’s and my memories comes from seeing typesetters’ mistakes or is based on a style that has gone out of favor.

Do you recall seeing the hyphenated imperative “Thank-You” years ago?

Do you believe that this form was a mistake or that it was a commonly accepted form?

Please let me know, and I will elaborate on this topic in a future post.

“CAUTION Large Trucks”

Commas, Hyphens, Imperatives

My wife and I saw this yesterday while exiting a parking facility.

Problem:
The significance of the caution sign was unclear.

Explanation:
The sign was a landscape-oriented sign above the exit from an underground parking structure, and “CAUTION Large Trucks” — with absolutely no punctuation — appeared in a single line on the sign.

My wife and I had just left a department store, and we were waiting in a queue of automobiles that were exiting the parking structure.

The sign appeared above an opening through which we had to pass and then make a sharp right turn (no left turns allowed) so as to travel up a one-way ramp that let cars enter a street.

The ramp began to the left of the opening.

What therefore became unclear was what the sign maker intended to say.

A possible but unlikely meaning was “Please caution the drivers of large trucks.”, but I could not tell you why I as a reader of the sign should caution the drivers of large trucks.

Here are two possible, rational meanings:

  1. “Take caution! Large trucks are approaching from your left as you focus on turning right onto this one-way ramp that leads up to the street.”
  2. “If you are driving a large truck, then take caution while turning to your right so as to avoid scraping the walls surrounding this exit ramp that leads up to the street.”

If I were to rewrite the first rational meaning in as few words as I could, then I would write, “CAUTION: Large Trucks Approaching from Left!”

If I were to rewrite the second rational meaning in as few words as I could, then I would write, “CAUTION: Turn Large Trucks Carefully!”

Notice that both rewritten forms had to include additional words but also had to include punctuation, which the original sign lacked.

In other words, brevity taken to the extreme can lead to confusion.

Solution:
Use punctuation on a sign such as this one to ensure that readers know what they are supposed to do.

“Congradulations!”

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Imperatives

My wife saw this on a banner in a grocery store years ago, and I have seen this increasingly often over the years.

Problem:
There is no such (properly spelled) word.

Explanation:
When my wife told a manager in the grocery store that the word on the banner was misspelled and even showed him where it was misspelled, the manager insisted, “No, it isn’t!”

Also, the manager did not suggest to my wife that it was a play on words — as in “ConGRADulations, GRADUATES!”

Instead, the manager argued that this was a properly spelled word.

I believe that spelling “congratulations” as “congradulations” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Because it’s simpler to say the ‘d’ in “congradulations” than to say the first ‘t’ in “congratulations”, many American English speakers mispronounce and hear it this way and subsequently believe that the ‘d’ belongs where the ‘t’ should go.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “congratulations” — 74,300,000 matches
  • “congradulations” — 1,360,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “congratulations” over “congradulations” by a ratio of 54.6:1 — good, but not great, especially given the more than one million matches for the misspelled word, and even assuming that some of the instances of “congradulations” were a play on words.

Solution:
“Congratulations!”