Missing hyphens

An ellipsis has three dots. A dash is not the same as a hyphen. It is preferable to use ‘and’ instead of an ampersand in everyday writing.

Maizie I’ve just come across a very good example of the importance of hyphens on another thread.
A poster wrote ‘super processed food’.
I’m quite sure, given the context, that she meant ‘over-processed food’ and not ‘really delicious processed food’.
But the absence of the hyphen did leave room for doubt.

Oooh. I've had a busy few days and it's so nice to come back to 'my' thread and find lots of responses

I find the lack of a hyphen in words like 'noone' and 'cooperate' particularly annoying because it makes reading even more difficult for people who struggle with the skill. English has a complex enough orthography to interpret without adding in more possible ways of pronouncing 'oo'. I used to work with children with reading difficulties so I suppose I'm extra sensitive to little problems like this.

I'm glad others find it irritating as well.

And how about whom?

Thanks, Shinyredcar. I've never been sure of the difference between (") and (').

Not entirely true GabriellaG -at any rate not always

www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv258.shtml

(Ps sorted out “who’s “ and “whose” yet?

That’s you told, pensionpat

Gabrielle. Well, blow me down. You live and learn. Thank you.

I think it's more the result of texting than computers, because computer keyboards are very complex, whereas phone-screen keyboards are not, but I do agree about the cows' carers.

I get irritated by other printing issues — acronyms used to be all capitals but because that is more difficult on a smartphone, NATO has become Nato and other familiar sets of initials have become words, too. Is it because people speak their messages? I won't say 'they dictate' because if they did, they would need to express the punctuation

I am old enough to remember 66 and 99 for speech marks, but these are now universally shown in print as ' ' quotation marks. And quotes are sandwiched by those marks, too, which really causes confusion for dinosaurs like me.

MaizieD I'm so with you! I can't write "noone", like you I read them all as "OO" as if an owl is in the room.
The auto corrector sometimes puts it right if i'm hurrying but generally is more of a nuisance, changing words I've deliberately written a certain way!

Oh lord.

I think punctuation is still important, the English language should be left alone thank you!

The 'Oxford' or 'series' comma is used before 'and' or 'or' when it comes before the last item in a series or list. There's been much controversy about it and I'd never mark a student wrong for forgetting this disputed rule.

I am of a generation probably slightly younger than some of the other ladies posting on here, and we were never given formal grammar and spelling tuition, any appreciation of this fine art coming purely from whatever we read. However, I think I picked up enough to be justifiably irritated at predictive text 'correcting' my input, particularly when I know I'm right and the predictive text is wrong!

My friend finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog
Leaving out the punctuation can result in some very strange comments!

It's also incorrect to place a comma before and and but as they are conjunctions.

pensionpat.
Fund raising is fine both ways but separate has only 1 e.

Is my mind playing tricks on me, or am I correct in saying the education system of about 30 years ago put more emphasis on the sounding of words rather than the correct spelling?

I assure you Saggi, those of us who are used to various Scottish dialects can understand a great deal more of the original Canterbury tales than one word in three!

The move away from hyphens in favour of writing some previously hyphenated words either as one word or two (a minefield in itself) occurred in Scotland when I was in the fourth form. I can clearly remember Mrs Holloway our form mistress going through to-day becoming today on the blackboard. The year must have been the school-year (school year) of 1956-57.

I don't remember what else apart from to-day, form-mistress, sewing-teacher and the like lost their hyphens then. I do know it has got much worse since.

I still write co-op if I mean the chain of shops, as coop is what I would keep my hens in, if I had any.

Incidentally, when did it become incorrect to punctuate as I just did in the previous sentence?
I was taught that a subordinate clause was always separated from a principal clause by a comma. Now you are only supposed to separate the subordinate clause from the principal by means of a comma, if it precedes the principal clause and not if it follows it.

Sometimes I feel the changes in spelling and punctuation actually make it harder to write correctly.

Admittedly, which words should be hyphenated and which should not was always a peculiar discipline. Form-mistress with a hyphen or in two words schoolmistress in one word, like headmistress/ headmaster, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

(Yes, I am still a strong believer in the so-called Oxford comma : comma before "and").

And I was taught to leave a space or half-space before colons and semi-colons, which rule no longer applies either, due mainly to the computer keyboard not having a half-space forward key like the typewriter did.

I think it's because instead of generating our own hyphens with fresh ink, we now have to get them from a pool on our computer server or the cloud. Obviously storage isn't infinite and if we overuse any character the store of that would run out. That's why there is no longer two spaces after a full stop, because even a space is actually an ASCII character.

It annoys me intensely & I still hyphenate words as I feel they look wrong

Haven't really noticed the demise of the hyphen but am laughing my socks off at the insertion of the word 'hyphen' in your name myym. ????

I agree entirely. It's not just hyphens though, what about apostrophies and the eternal "ink" instead of "ing", It drives me mad that our beautiful language is being destroyed by idiots.

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