1:19 minutes of fame

[cellio]

The nice folks who run Conterpoint (the DC instantiation of the floating east-coast filk convention) sent me some copies of the Conterpoint III CD a few days ago. (On the Mark has one song on it.) It's a good CD, even setting aside that natural inclination to view it favorably. :-)

Our track (We Be Three Poor Mariners) came out pretty well. Kathy is too quiet relative to the rest of us, but Kathy is always too quiet relative to the rest of us, and this wasn't a studio situation where we could each have our own mike. Oh well.

Conterpoint IV was in June; I wonder if any of our songs came out well enough to end up on that eventual CD. (I haven't heard the official tape of the set yet.)

"Ya Done Stomped on my Heart (and mashed that sucker flat)" just went by -- Joe Bethancourt's rendition. I first heard it from Clam Chowder, as a fairly lively country-western piece. Joe did what he described as "honkey-tonk"; I don't know enough about these modern music styles to characterize that. (It was more talky than melodic, but not in the way that blues often is.) I like the Chowder version a lot better, though that could be familiarity. I'll have to listen to this CD 20 or 30 times to see if this one grows on me. :-)

One of the highlights on this CD is Bethancourt's "Unanswered Questions", which starts: "Does anal-retentive have a hyphen or not?" and goes from there. (Yes, Monica interjects, of course a multi-word adjective has a hyphen.)

I see that the CD is going to finish up with Clam Chowder's version of the Agincourt Carol. Think calypso. It's very funny.

Comments

[cellio]

I used to think so. I agree that a multi-word noun does not get a hyphen; I'm just not sure that "anal retentive" is ever correctly a noun. Do you call someone "an anal retentive", or do you say that he "is anal-retentive"?

And just to complete the set of common hyphenation problems, we all agree that multi-word verbs are not hyphenated, right? I have seen "please log-in to the machine" too many times... This is wrong. (So is "login to the machine" in my opinion, but that's apparently more controversial.)

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I think "anal retentive" is sometimes correctly a noun, though I'll grant it may be rare. To me, "He is an anal retentive" sounds like a (grammatically correct) statement made by a fussy parlor Freudian.

I agree that "log-in" is wrong; I'm not qutie so sure about login, because "login" sounds to me like a reasonable verb for what you do at a login prompt.

The other complication, of course, is that hyphenation changes over time. "E-mail" changes to "email", for example.

While we're politely quibbling about small matters like this, how do you feel about "the Internet" vs. "Internet"? (As in "We need a presence on the Internet" vs. "We need a presence on Internet") To my ear, "the Internet" requires a "the", but, for example, "Usenet" requires no "the".

[cellio]

I think "anal retentive" is sometimes correctly a noun, though I'll grant it may be rare. To me, "He is an anal retentive" sounds like a (grammatically correct) statement made by a fussy parlor Freudian.

Could be, and I can't actually cite sources or anything. Whenever I find myself in a grammatical quandry, I try substituting other words that play the same role to see what I get. I wouldn't say "he is an annoying" or "he is a pesky", but maybe "anal retentive" is a special kind of adjective that can be made nominal and I'm just not hitting on it. Hmm.

I agree that "log-in" is wrong; I'm not qutie so sure about login, because "login" sounds to me like a reasonable verb for what you do at a login prompt.

I find myself craving two words, not a single word or a hyphenated word. Probably because the preposition wasn't originally attached to the word. So you "log in", but you have a "login prompt".

As you point out, these things evolve over time, from multiple words to hyphenated words to single words (dropping hyphens). And, of course, not everyone makes the transitions at the same time. Didn't we (dev team, not the two of us specifically) have an argument at Claritech about "multi-threaded" versus "multithreaded", for instance?

While we're politely quibbling about small matters like this, how do you feel about "the Internet" vs. "Internet"? (As in "We need a presence on the Internet" vs. "We need a presence on Internet") To my ear, "the Internet" requires a "the", but, for example, "Usenet" requires no "the".

Last things first: Usenet was (is) pretty clearly a proper noun, so doesn't take an article. "Internet" is a funny case; I tend to think of it as generic and not proper (so "the internet"), but ARPAnet was definitely proper. I admit that I am being inconsistent. I just don't like the sound of "internet" without the "the".

There seem to be some people out there who think "Web" is proper, too. I always say "the web", and I never capitalize the "w". (I'm inconsistent about the "i" in "internet".)

cute grammar quote

[cellio]

It's been often stated that "any noun can be verbed", but it often sounds funny when you try to do the reverse. I like this quote, which I saw in a .sig file some time back:

"It's not the verbing that weirds the language, it's the renounification."
-- Marc LeBlanc