Grammatical oddity

[msmemory_archive]

Something I've seen a few places lately, which really makes me twitch: the hyphenated contraction. I'm talking about did-n't, could-n't, and so forth. Surely not a legitimate usage! Ugh.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen that (but it looks REALLY weird). One of my professors was writing "binary opposition" on the board today and wrote "bi-nary" which might be legitimate, but I've never seen it before and it looks weird to me.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Ebonics?

[cellio]

Weird! Surely not legitimate, IMO.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Surely not. I flagged them in the text I was proofreading.

[silme.livejournal.com]

No, no, no! Please say that practice isn't becoming accepted. :(

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

A funny thing is - it used to be. I've seen several 19th century facsimiles that looked like they hyphenated contractions as the rule - I think they basically thought of them as compound words, which used to be hyphenated much more often than is the current practice.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Did the 19th c facsimiles hyphenate them across line breaks, which was the usage I'm deprecating in the 21st c manuscript?

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Not that I recall, though at the time I wasn't looking for that - I was looking specifically at how compound word phrases became one word. A 19th/early 20th century manuscript is likely to write "length-wise", for example.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

The times I've seen that was around a line break (which seems icky but not unreasonable) or a place where there had been a line break at some point. (There are a couple of books I've read recently where there had obviously been some sort of layout change, and so there are lots of hyphenations mid-line....)

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

I think they look ugly, but I've accepted them at times for line-breaking purposes. The alternative was to declare that a word the length of "shouldn't" could not be divided.