Slashdot Mirror
Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens
An anonymous reader writes Author Graeme Reynolds found his novel withdrawn from Amazon because of excessive use of hyphens. He received an email from Amazon about his werewolf novel, High Moor 2: Moonstruck, because a reader had complained that there were too many hyphens. "When they ran an automated spell check against the manuscript they found that over 100 words in the 90,000-word novel contained that dreaded little line," he says. "This, apparently 'significantly impacts the readability of your book' and, as a result, 'We have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.'"
You-should-ask-slashdot-to-publish-the-book-they-LIKE-hyphens.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
f-o-x-t-r-o-t-u-n-i-f-o-r-m-c-h-a-r-l-i-e-k-i-l-o-y-o-u-a-m-a-z-o-n
So, Amazon is now the grammar police?
I'm sure there are hundreds (if not thousands) of books on Amazon which have absolutely shit grammar and punctuation.
To quote the author of the book ... what the actual fuck?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...there would be no Slashdot summaries.
At least link to the actual story, rather than the discussion of the story.
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation.
Jeez. That was in the second paragraph of TFA.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
How would that fraction even be deemed significant?
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
I also think it's about time they take down down on Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" from their mp3 store until someone can do something about the number of notes.
"Your book, that I downloaded in digital format rather than the bulky dead wood format, is unreadable as I sit on the subway/bus on my way to work. This is an outrage!"
Apparently the person(s) who complained have such perfect lives and no other issues to worry about, they had to find something to complain about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hyphens! Book too dashing! Hyphens! Warning!
Doesn't the dam-ned text get re-flowed by the devi-ce or so-mething? That be-ing said, this is ridi-culous, all my prin-ted books have a few hy-phens, and I've ne-ver had any dif-ficulty rea-ding them. Maybe Ama-zon should just add "don't hyphenate" setting on their reading device and end it once and for all?
When you host your content on someone else's systems.
Over 100, so lets say there are 150. That's only one every 600 words for a 90,000 word book; basically it's only once every page and a half that it even occurs. Is it really that big of a deal? Not to mention fantasy tends to used the hyphen pretty regularly in names/places. It really just seems an odd thing to attack and try to minimize by the distributor. My guess is that they had one issue and now is just creating other issues. Silly amazon being silly as usual.
How many did the novel contain? Over 100 tells us very little. Was it 1000, 10000, 50000 of the 90000 words? Those are all over 100.
The Age of The Whiner.
From over hyphenation, to nerfed weapons in video games, to over regulation of the Internet due to trolls (you know... instead of ignoring them).
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Then that reader should be beaten with a tank hammer
how-hard-is-it-to-proofread-the-dept
no-im-not-new-here
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
of what Melania G (the Amazon/Kindle exec) is smoking -- it must be really good stuff!
What's next? Taking down Winnie the Pooh because there are too many bounces before Tigger pounces?
You know, the extra ones.
There were 100 words hyphenated out of 90,000? So-What?
Good luck not "host[ing] your content on someone else's systems" when the market-dominating viewing device is hardcoded to use "someone else's systems". This appears to be true of both e-readers (Kindle) and handheld video game players with buttons (PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS).
There are unfortunately lots of Unicode characters with the graphical appearance of a horizontal line at roughly the height of the middle line of a capital E. If you use the wrong one then it might look right for you but disastrously wrong for some readers. I suspect this may have happened in this case.
There is some ambiguity but if we don't care very much, we can go ahead and make an assumption that is often pretty good. When somebody says over X, X is usually the closest round number smaller than the quantity of interest. So, "over 100" is likely to be somewhere between 100 and 200, and almost certainly less than 1000. Moreover, whenever somebody says "over X," I take it to mean that the number is at least X and for the purpose of the argument they're willing to stand by their position even if it were exactly X. Although this particular novel exceeded the threshold, Amazon is claiming that even 100 hyphens per 90,000 words would be too many.
Amazon will be telling authors to break their novels into chapters and paragraphs.
The only way Slashdot would publish a book is if Bennett Haselton wrote it.
Because hyphens are quite common in Finnish i suppose amazon nolonger sells any Finnish stories.
Sorry, too many parens.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
.
Maybe I should start hitting the Amazon reviews and flagging all the books whose grammar usage I find confusing.
Let's see, this book uses strange and confusing Capitalization, making it difficult to read. Maybe Amazon should suppress it as well.
Haven't they already published several of his books?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
thats-too-expensive-let-the-cusomers-proof-read-it.
Although, if amazon are taking in 30% of the sales, they do need to proof-read, since traditional publishers have been doing that for centuries.
The book has been reformatted and is available again. Quit your bitching slashdot. Why do I waste my time here?
Actually, your title is an (admittedly exaggerated) example of how hyphens can assist readability. The hyphens make clear that you are using a compound adjective. In fact, a common error in writing is omitting hyphens when they are necessary. For example, someone writing I saw a man eating alligator probably meant I saw a man-eating alligator .
Exactly.
I guess Burroughs, Céline and countless other authors need not apply.
Apple censors whatever the fuck they want and don't even give you the reasons.
I hate you apple pushers so fucking much.
The Kindle can load its ebooks from anywhere.
In that case, the market dynamic is more like Android, or like music on the iPod prior to iTunes Plus: supporting only one digital restrictions management platform as well as DRM-free works from anywhere.
A lot of authors choose to use digital restrictions management so that they can sell more than one copy without having it be leaked to a mass infringement ring through an untraceable, judgment-proof member. The owner of an iPod can install DRM-free MP3 or M4A files from anywhere. But for nearly a decade after the iPod came out, the major record labels refused to sell DRM-free audio files over the Internet for fear of a leak to Napster or its successors (Gnutella, KaZaA, WinMX, and eDonkey2000), and iPod supported only the so-called FairPlay DRM platform used by iTunes. The owner of an Android device can install apps from anywhere (with "Unknown sources" turned on) with the APK file. But APK files lack DRM, so a lot of app developers publish their paid apps only through Google Play Store. And for the same reason, a lot of e-book authors publish their paid books only through DRM platforms. Can Kindle load e-books from any DRM platform, or does it support only Amazon's DRM platform?
It's self-publishing. No, they don't need to proof read.
Looks like Amazon was being dumb.
The problem was not too many hyphens, but rather that there were no hyphens. He had used the minus sign and that breaks some text-speech readers.
Graeme has already fixed it.
This is Graeme's blog telling the story, the problem, and the fix.
https://graemereynolds.wordpre...
Probably OVER 9000!!!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The difference between the two being particularly notable as someone who lives in Florida... the former is most often a native and the latter most often a tourist.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Could have been a proctology book rejected for too many colons.
They still sell Heideger's being-in-time : and his entire philosophical shtick is using hyphens!
Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few, and it will be perfect.
It turns out that he did have a formatting issue in the ebook: http://the-digital-reader.com/... The author coded the ebook by hand and used minus signs in place of hyphens. While that would look okay when you read the ebook, a TTS engine would have issues.
So what if it turned out one of the character names was hyphenated?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Most man-eating alligators are natives... their food, on the other hand...
There goes my book in morse code!
That is all.
Not handling hyphens, minus signs or whatever: it doesn't surprise me in the least.
Why don't eBook publishers use a typesetting system based on TeX or LaTeX? Good grief. I was formatting complex mathematical formulas and pretty printing them to Postscript and PDF before the lot of you were born. And not just text with mere hyphens.
Is there something I'm missing, or are eBooks a major step backwards in formatting? Really. I can't tell you how many computer science and mathematics eBooks I've returned to Amazon or B&N because of the sh***y formatting of code and math formulas. Not just when eBooks first came out, but on and on, year after year, and it doesn't get better. It strikes me as the laziness of corporations.
If only they would do the same for parentheses.
censorship is bad as well as abusing workers.
the workers in germany need to strike till they get what they want.
Amazon decided to pull a book because of punctuation. I guess next time it sentence structure, or maybe using certain words too many times. And words in sentences lead to ideas, so any ideas that Amazon feels affects the reader in a negative manner should also be blocked. From punctuation, to language, to the author's thoughts and intents of putting word to paper, once Amazon starts to believe that it is the arbiter of what is good, or allowable to it's readers, then authors and readers should decide that maybe Amazon isn't what's best for them.
I thought, they preferred, commas, that have, no logical reason, to be, there.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's what I meant. Posting too early in the morning...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The book was professionally edited. It's by a British author using British english. While some of the hyphens could have been removed they were not grammatically incorrect. The problem seems to be that Amazon does not recognise British grammar and punctuation differences.
In traditional book publishing, the author gets about 5% of the list. The publisher sells the book to a retailer for 50% of the list price and the author typically get about 10% of what the publisher sells it for. At least that's what it was in my case. So getting 70% on a self-published book isn't a bad deal. Though editors are still important.
Waiting for amazon to ban Blood Meridian for shitty interpunction.
Ah, yet another confirmation that almost no one at Amazon understands books. A mere 100+ hyphenated words in a 90,000 word novel sounds almost spartan. Quite a few new words start off hyphenated, such as e-mail. And it's proper practice to hyphenate certain pairs of adjectives, such as 'Ice-age tribes.' I edit scientific books, and they're filled with such pairs.
This also illustrates Amazon control freaky attitude. Although they provide little of the useful services offered by publisher and editors, Amazon does step in from time to time and, in some really stupid way, and play the role of a publisher or editor. When it comes to authors, Amazon is like Comcast. Its basic attitude is "We're smart, you're stupid, so do as we say."
Amazon can be so stupid, it's easy to suspect that'd stop the sale of Ernst Hemingway if some reader complained that his sentences were too short.
I just checked the iBookstore, Smashwords and B&N's Nook store. None are carrying Graeme Reynolds's ebook. That is a major, major blunder. Amazon did change their mind. His book is available again from them. But he'd have been wiser to have it available from multiple retailers. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, least of all control-obsessed Amazon.
He may, as the article claims, not have know the different uses of dashes. That could explain why what few hyphens he has, some say, look like the much large M-dashes. Here's are the basic rules.
Hyphen is the key on your keyboard. Use it for hyphenated words either to combine two into one joined word (Ice-age tribes) or to wrap a word at the end of a line.
N-dash. There'll be a special key sequence for this. It's a dash the width of the letter N, hence the name. Use this for a range of values, such as "you will find that discussed on pages 37Ã"43."
M-dash. This is the really long one, one as long as a capital M is wide. Use it, typically in pairs, to set off text more vividly than with commas. Example: "TomÃ"and this is his most obvious faultÃ"is a liar pure and simple."
Glad to hear his book is available again.
--Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily's Ride
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
From Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
<acerbic>
These days 75% of all Slashdot posts seem to involve drilling down to get the original story straight. Tell me, when did a mass-confusion clusterfuck become the new nerd foreplay? Kindle typography, meet declining Slashdot editorial standards. You've got more in common than you think.
</acerbic>
Since Graeme posted about the problems with Amazon, everyone on the internet seems to have an opinion. The arguments range from the book not having been proofread to bad use of punctuation to bad formatting. Let me clear a few things up.
Yes, the use of a minus sign rather than a hyphen was incorrect (and has now been corrected), but Amazon made it clear in their email that they had removed the book from sale because of 'hyphenated words' so their system recognised the minus sign as a hyphen.
The book was not a self-published piece of work by someone who had no clue what they were doing. Graeme Reynolds is a professional and the book went through a rigorous editing process. There have been over 100 5* reviews in the 18 months it has been on sale and this is the first time anyone has complained about the grammar or punctuation.
The use of hyphens was correct. This may sound odd to some of you, but it was. Graeme Reynolds is a British author writing in British English and his books are set in Britain. While some of the hyphens can be removed without changing the meaning of the words, they are all correct in British English. Amazon wanted the removal of all hyphens which would make the book unreadable.
The reason Graeme Reynolds publicly voiced his anger at their decision was because Amazon were essentially removing the book because of the writing style rather than an issue with incorrect grammar or punctuation, and that they based their decision on a reader's complaint rather than investigating first. What happens next time when someone complains that a writer has placed commas at the top of the letters rather than the bottom? Do we then have to remove apostrophes so we don't confuse people?
The hyphens make clear that you are using a compound adjective. In fact, a common error in writing is omitting hyphens when they are necessary. For example, someone writing I saw a man eating alligator probably meant I saw a man-eating alligator .
This, this and this.
Awhile ago, we saw a story on this site about a chocolate printer. Of course this was actually a chocolate-printer, a device that prints using chocolate. However, without the hyphen, it refers to a printer that is made out of chocolate. Without the hyphen, what are we to make of The Chocolate Lover's Cookbook?
Hyphens are also important when one needs to disambiguate between compound adjectives and compound nouns. What's a high school building? A building that's a high school (a high-school building) or a school building that is high (a high school-building)?
Hyphens are just another example of how we treat punctuation marks as though they were boogers, something to be expunged and discarded, kept away from ourselves and others. But without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Do tourists not eat alligators? Don't they sell it in restaurants.
I know they didn't have it on the menu at Disney.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I-know-it's-their-imprint-and-all-;-but-sheesh!-Talk-about-your-grammar-nazis...
You know, a C# textbook I got on Amazon really did have too many { and ; in it.
actually.We.Are.More.Into.Dots.Around.Here
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Hyphens are just another example of how we treat punctuation marks as though they were boogers, something to be expunged and discarded, kept away from ourselves and others. But without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.
This.
I cannot count how many times I have been excoriated in these very pages for my "excessive" use of quotation-marks.
I then feel compelled to "defend" myself, citing the grammatical rules that show all the alternate uses of same.
Fortunately, that usually shuts up those people.
They are a distribution and a print on demand service, not a publisher.
XDInd
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
Or even better, APL.
Maybe they had a lot of characters with hyphenated names? Or exotic locales?
This is why we can't let Amazon become a virtual monopoly on books... Because they have ZERO obligation to inform the public of their ditto risk decisions. Flagging an upcoming book for "too many hyphens" is pretty severe censorship of the worst kind... AUTOMATED.
I get the Mpls Star-Tribune via Kindle subscription, and usually read it on my phone.
Quite often articles in said journal are messed up when I read them, with all the long words coming out hyp-hen-ated.
I imagine #they'd totally $freak at a @book about &perl.
Or even better, APL.
Or Brainfuck, more politely known as B****fuck.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The en-dash is primarily used for both a minus sign and to indicate ranges in numbers (from 2–3 days). The em-dash is used as a kind of parenthesis (I am saying—not for the first time—that I am mad).
On a Mac you make an en-dash with option-hyphen, and an em-dash with option-shift-hyphen. I haven't used a PC for this kind of work in at least 10 years, but I do recall that entering en- and em-dashes was a hassle.
Have gnu, will travel.
They do sometimes but generally alligators tend to eat (stupid) tourists.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I guess they should surpress Tolstoy's "War and Peace" for having too many words... Or Seus's "The Cat In The Hat" for too much silliness. Get real Amazon! You are NOT supposed to be the arbiter of good literary taste or form! You are supposed to sell books that the public wants to read!
I expect it's an artifact of the coversion to e-book. I've seen it a lot in self-published books. Cases where words that shouldn't be hyphenated are and it's very obvious when it happens. That's the only reason I can see for this happening.
Which tastes more like chicken? Human or Alligator?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Spoken language contains many variations of timing and inflection that clarify such things. Punctuation exists specifically to impart a rough approximation of those subtleties to the comparatively crude written language.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Then, on 12 December, Reynolds got an email from the internet retailer, which had apparently received a complaint from a reader
So let me get this straight, A SINGLE COMPLAINT got this guys novel pulled!?! Who was the person that complained anyway CEO of Amazon?
"This,
* A comma between subject and predicate
apparently 'significantly impacts the readability of your book' and, as a result, 'We
* Capitalizing a word after a comma
have suppressed the book because of the combined impact to customers.'"
Flooding their market with junk books devalues the market as a whole.
Or why nobody understands what "chicken fried steak" is, but might very well understand what chicken-fried steak is.
What is next? Banning Ulysses from Joyce because the sentences are too long?
You hurt my brain.
Sorry, that hyphen does nothing. What on Earth is one of those when it's at home?!?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
without them, we cannot distinguish a panda bear who eats shoots and leaves from a mob hit-man who eats, shoots and leaves.
No Oxford comma? Mod parent down!
Required reading for internet skeptics
It probably has a better chance than my book: Whitespace by example
Required reading for internet skeptics
What on Earth is one of those when it's at home?!?
Cannot parse.
Does Amazon sell collections of Emily Dickenson poetry? She was mad into the humble hyphen.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
My "Brainfuck for Dummies" book will have a lot of buggy sample code now that Amazon has decided I can only make 1 decrement per 10000 instructions. So I have to implement Brainfuck unit tests... and I just finished the chapter on how to write the code delinter and the JIT compiler!
> pompous ignorami
I bet that isn't even the correct Latin declination.
Judging that you're not American, "Chicken-fried steak" is a tenderized steak, breaded and fried in the manner that "fried chicken" is done. Common usage/writing leaves out the hyphen (even on restaurant menus), so it's unclear that it's a compound adjective. As a result, people assume that it contains chicken or have no idea what to expect.
There goes my idea to self-publish "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe in Morse Code".
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
So, schnitzel then?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Different breading, but similar idea.
Shoot. There goes my idea of self-publishing a book written entirely in morse code.
I just did a quick cat / tr / grep / wc on Lord of the Rings, and got:
Fellowship of the Rings: 1361 hyphenated words out of 178,672
The Two Towers: 1047 of 154,403
Return of the King: 829 of 135,285
This guy gets kicked to the curb for 100 hyphens out of 90,000 words? Pooh. It's a matter of style.
Oxford commas are optional, and recommended when they improve clarity. In this case, the one after "eats" is enough. Besides, I was quoting the title of the well-known book.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
And you think proof reading is the only difference between a amazon digital book and a traditionally published book? A paper book publisher does cover design, has a printing press to print books and ships books to distributors and retailers. Those are the main reasons for the small cut for the author. Digital books have no printing and transportation costs. Plus, the paper book author had no choice but to get what tiny income he could because there was no practical way to sell books without a publisher. With the internet, you don't need any publisher, not even amazon.
Simply hosting a few MB file (the book) and processing a credit card payment is not enough to justify charging 30%. The need to proof read too. Apple checks (proof reads) apps before they are published in the app store.
...which is what they should be called.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
We'll never know what happened last weekend to little Robert: he either helped his uncle, jack, off a horse or he helped his uncle jack off a horse.
It's not difficult to parse the syntax, even if you can't grasp the semantic meaning.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
One of what? Why does it have a home?
And you think proof reading is the only difference between a amazon digital book and a traditionally published book?
Don't put words in my mouth. I handled the cover design for my books, though the publisher did offer to do it and did convert it into a format that was better suited for a book cover. I wrote technical books, so the publisher also paid for technical assessments to make sure I wasn't wrong along with the editing. Those are very valuable services.
Simply hosting a few MB file (the book) and processing a credit card payment is not enough to justify charging 30%.
But hosting a few dead trees in a warehouse is worth 50% of a book? Amazon is the 300lb gorilla in book sales, so they'll charge what they think they can get away with. If another vendor comes along and gets the name recognition that Amazon has and only takes 20%, then Amazon may change their ways.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that authors have lots of options to get their work out. But the choice is they either get about 5% and have a huge infrastructure behind them to help get their work out, promoted, and looking nice, or doing most of it themselves and getting 70% and hope they have an underground hit that lots of people buy.
The Oxford comma is so twentieth century.
(And yet I love it so)
Ah, but you can improve the clarity of the spoken language by also including punctuation. Victor Borge provided us with a fine guide to phonetic punctuation. http://community.eflclassroom.com/video/victor-borge-phonetic-punctuation
They have all those names with apostrophes in them.
Damn annoying to read.
100 hyphens out of 90,000 words???? Are you freaking kidding me?????
Sounds to me like they've gotten a call from a now infamous Reverend from Mississippi who called a now infamous radio station regarding the foul language, despite the warnings preceding it, contained within a now infamous record of spoken word by the now infamous George Carlin.
It's no different. First it was radio broadcast, then it was Television broadcast, now it's cable and satellite, video games have ratings and restrictions too. Here comes books, and finally, the internet.
Then there will be nothing at all to stop the Ministry of Truth. Beware the thought police!
We now interrupt this post for the daily two-minutes-hate.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
A) A chicken-fried steak. What is one of those? (Now answered.)
B) The "when it's at home" is just a turn of phrase used to emphasise cluelessness. At least where I'm from.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
To someone unfamiliar with that idiom, it sounds like someone who isn't fluent in English. Now that I know what it means, I just think it's weird to hear that phrase used for a non-person entity.
Your response is predicated on the assumption that the Amazon Algorithms operate in a logic-based environment. This has not been proven to be the case. Amazon can remove books and other items from its store arbitrarily, and according to no logic known to humankind. It does the same to reviews of books and other products. I've gotten ebooks (from major publishers, I might add) with artifacts of conversion that were far more egregious than hyphens (leftover XML code, LaTeX symbols, etc.) from Amazon. Some books will feature complaints about formatting or editing in dozens of reviews and Amazon does nothing, while others, like this one, will be pulled for unsubstantiated customer complaints, or worse--customer complaints about an entirely different book! The almighty algorithms are great 90% of the time, but humans do still need to oversee.
Whereas "chicken fried steak" probably indicates that one is in possession of domestic fowl with culinary skills...
Spoken language is also often misunderstood and needs to be clarified by the speaker, sometimes with a whiteboard or pictures to assist.
If you are playing a game, and the rules state you need to choose between the following: pass, play, draw and discard. Does that mean you have to discard if you draw? Or not? How many piles do I have if I have one pile each for for my carrots, lettuce, macaroni and cheese? Three or four?
Unless you specifically mean three, or you must discard after drawing, then PLEASE just use the oxford comma so people know what the heck you mean. There's a reason why serious style guides mandate this: it often significantly changes the meaning of the sentence.
You could be right. I'm certainly usually the first one in the Amazon sux line.
According to Merriam Webster, "hit man" should not be hyphenated ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
According to Merriam Webster, "hit man" should not be hyphenated ...
Alas, Merriam-Webster is part of the problem. A "hit-man" is an assassin, but a "hit man" is a man who has been hit.
I confess that my opinion on hyphens has been influenced strongly by an article I read years ago, and for which I can no longer find a link. The author of that piece ranted in particular about irregularities in Merriam-Webster on the matter of hyphens. For example, "bee-eater", a beautiful bird whose diet includes stinging insects, becomes in Merriam-Webster a "bee eater", a bee who eats.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
We'll never know what happened last weekend to little Robert: he either helped his uncle, jack, off a horse or he helped his uncle jack off a horse.
And the horse has four legs and flies.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's not the hyphens.
*ANYTHING* that cuts another vampire/zombie/werewolf book needs to be viewed as a goodthing . . .
hawk
Hyphen, Most commonly used by every one. For a punctuation, Penalizing the book wasn't expected..
If you're the sort of person who relies on the likes of Amazon (high volume, low-margin pile-it-high-and-sell-it-cheap merchants) as your personal arbiter of taste and relevance, then yes you'd devalue your market. However, by taking Amazon as a reviewer of books, you've already suspended your judgement to a high degree.
A couple of weeks ago I was pointed to Amazon by a friend who'd written a new book (not, by about 10 books, his first publication, but I think his first with Amazon). Amazon would only admit to the existence of a Kindle version - which I might have considered if it were a manual or a text-based book. But for a book allegedly rich in my friend's generally excellent photography of his several month's travelling in Patagonia and southern South America, a screen simply isn't the appropriate format.
So, eventually, Amazon, by pushing their Kindle version lost about £10 of trade in Kindle editions, and the ink-on-paper publishers got about £70 for the print editions (of the photo book, and the accompanying travelogue book) ; way to go, Amazon!
The wife and I noted their efforts to force us off getting discs form Lovefilm and onto downloading shit off their website somewhere. Nope ; not interested ; account cancelled and a pits-on-polycarbonate account opened with a different provider. Oh dear. What a pity. How sad. Never. mind.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The term "Oxford comma" exists only because the term "Chicago omission" would not indicate something visible. There was no such thing as an Oxford comma until the Chicago omission was invented. Omitting the comma creates a jarring inconsistency, results in unnecessary doubletakes, and fails to convey the cadences and inflections of the spoken sentence.
Ah, but state those rules out loud (assuming you are already confident as to what they are) and the comma or its lack will almost certainly be apparent in your speech, at least to an astute listener. Which is also the reason I use it sporadically in "and" conjunctions as well - in that case the alternatives are usually roughly equivalent, but may have subtly different implications. I write like I speak, and commas appear in the places where I pause to separate concepts. It may not always adhere to the formal rules, but is usually clearly comprehensible. I think.
Which raises the question: how to write a sentence to proactively state that you do in fact mean for "draw and discard" to be a discrete concept?
If I say "I have one pile each for for my carrots, lettuce, , macaroni and cheese.", does that clarify that I do in fact have three piles*? The english language would well benefit from an equivalent to mathematical parenthesis, or perhaps something somewhat more expressive. Conciseness in language is not something that should have to depend on the normal usage of language being concise - it never will be. For maximum utility and adoption it should be something where the various common permutations can be seamlessly dropped in to a casual conversation where conciseness is useful, before disappearing again into the rough-and-tumble realities of casual conversation.
* Yes, I do consider .", to be the correct punctuation - how else would you unambiguously characterize the way that sentence should be read?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
*shrug* I'm sure you say plenty of stuff that would sound weird to me.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Like chicken fried steak, for starters....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'