I do a lot of writing and so am often confronted with the question of whether or not to use a hyphen. I am too lazy to develop an overarching theory to govern their use and so use it idiosyncratically, depending on my mood and whether it ‘feels’ right.

Mary Norris writes about the history of the symbol and the various policies regarding their use. I was amazed to learn that there are actual books written about it.

The invention of the hyphen has been credited to Dionysius Thrax, a Greek grammarian who worked at the Library of Alexandria in the second century B.C. Mahdavi writes, “The elegant, sublinear bow-shaped U-hyphen . . . was used to fuse words and highlight words that belonged together.” Much later, in fifteenth-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg used hyphens liberally (in their modern form) to justify the columns of heavy Gothic type in his Bible.
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The hyphen continues to serve a dual purpose: it both connects and separates. In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered; and it is instrumental in the formation of compounds, where it is famously subject to erosion. Yesteryear’s “ball-point pen” became the “ballpoint,” “wild-flowers” evolved into “wildflowers,” and “teen-age” found acceptance as “teenage” in most outlets (but not in this one).
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The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. Some words he closed up (“bumblebee”), others he divided in two (“fig leaf”). When people objected, he argued that the general public didn’t understand the rules governing the hyphen and didn’t care enough to learn them.

Then there is the problem of the ‘non-breaking’ hyphen, where you use the symbol but do not want to have it break up something at the end of the line. For example, the US interstate highway labeling system consists of things like ‘I-80’. Preventing it from being split requires extra programming.

Figuring out the rules for when to use a hyphen seems like hard work. I think I will continue my hit-or-miss approach.

It happened again.

I was at a party with a sizable crowd and where I did not know anyone other than my hosts. So I did the usual self-introduction thing and told them my first name. One woman said, “I remember when I can incapacitated by it in college”. She had, like so many others, thought my name was spelled and pronounced as ‘mono’, short for mononucleosis, the infectious disease sometimes referred to as ‘the kissing disease’ because the Epstein-Barr virus that causes it is spread through saliva and kissing is a common way of transmission.

Actually, there is a subtle difference in pronunciation between the two words but many people miss it and usually go to the first word they are familiar with. I then tell them that it is spelled and pronounced like the Spanish word for ‘hand’ and that clears things up, especially if they know some Spanish.

I sometimes wonder whether I should bother at all. It seems a little picky and suggests an elevated sense of self-importance to correct people on such a minor error as the pronunciation of your name, especially with people I am likely to never meet again. So why do I do it? Perhaps it is because I do not wish it thought that my parents were weird enough to give me a name associated with a virus.

Incidentally, I had never heard of this disease in Sri Lanka, likely because kissing on the lips is something that is only done within the context of marriage or extremely clandestinely between two intimate partners. So while in the US, it can spread widely on college and high school campuses, in Sri Lanka it was totally absent. At least, I did not know a single person who contracted it.

My daughters got me started on trying my hand at Wordle, the online word-guessing game. You have to guess a five-letter English word. After each guess, you are told if you had a correct letter in the correct place or a correct letter in the wrong place.

The good thing about this is that it takes just a few minutes. It turns out that on average, people guess the correct word in slightly less than four attempts. I was initially surprised at this because I thought that it would take more tries. But it turns out that of the possible 12,000 or so five-letter words, the puzzle only uses 2,309 common ones. You quickly realize that is not that hard to zero in on the correct word. If you are baffled, you can find the answer to the day’s puzzle here.

A helpful piece of information is the frequency of letters that appear in English words. In descending order, they are: E A R I O T N S L C U D P M H G B F Y W K V X Z J Q. The choice of a good starting word is important and this article discusses possible choices.

This game is similar in spirit to the board game Mastermind, where you have pegs of eight different colors and one person places five of them (colors can be repeated) in a particular arrangement and the other person has to guess what the pattern is in as few attempts as possible. After each attempt, you are told if you have a peg of the right color in the right location or the right color in the wrong location. This is harder than Wordle because there are 8⁵ = 32,768 combinations. (If you want to make it even harder, you can allow for an empty slot so that the number of combinations becomes 9⁵ = 59,049.) The online version of Mastermind allows you to vary the number of pegs.

Here is a little puzzle to think about.

The monk Gaito lives at the bottom of a hill just outside the ancient town of Huroko. One day, the monk leaves his home at 6:00am and makes his way up the hill along the narrow path that winds its way to the peak. The monk walks all day, occasionally stopping to rest and meditate, sometimes even retracing his steps for short distances, and arrives at the peak at 10:00pm. After spending the night fasting at the top, the monk starts the return journey at 6:00am the next morning and goes down the same narrow winding path, once again stopping occasionally or retracing his steps at various points along the way for contemplation. The monk returns to his home at the base of the hill at 10:00pm.
 
When you consider the monk’s two journeys, is it guaranteed that there will be at least one point along the path where the monk will be located at the same time during the day for both trips?

You can put your solutions and reasons in the comments.

Continuing my program of putting on this blog my published articles, this one was published by me in Change magazine in the March/April 2008 issue, p. 40-43.

I wrote this in order to help faculty who often did not have good writing habits and hence were less productive in their scholarly output than they might have been. I was gratified by the number of them who said that it helped them a lot.

Seven Suggestions for Becoming a More Productive Writer

I hate to read reports like this one yesterday where tennis player Naomi Osaka was severely heckled during her match.

Naomi Osaka was reduced to tears after being heckled during her second-round defeat to Veronika Kudermetova in Indian Wells.

The Japanese player, who missed parts of the 2021 season to look after her mental health, was jeered early in the match and it was undoubtedly a major factor as she lost 6-0, 6-4 to the world No 24.

A spectator reportedly shouted “Naomi, you suck”, with Osaka complaining to the umpire, and as she went to serve at the start of the third game, she was visibly crying. Clearly affected, she lost the first set without winning a game, before putting up a better fight in the second.

This behavior was especially cruel since Osaka has had well-known issues with mental health that have caused her to withdraw from some major tournaments. But it appears that this particular tournament has a nasty reputation for obnoxious fan behavior.
[Read more…]

In football it is highly embarrassing, to put it mildly, when a player accidentally puts the ball into their own goal. Such ‘own goals’ are rare but they do happen.

So imagine how a player must feel when they score three own goals in a single international game. This happened to New Zealand defender Meikayla Moore in a game against the US.

Moore’s nightmare started early when she tried to stop a cross from Sophia Smith but instead redirected the ball into her own net. A minute later, Catarina Macario’s header was going wide until it glanced off Moore’s head. Her unenviable hat-trick was completed after Margaret Purce’s cross from the right wing. Moore stuck out her foot to clear the ball, but again it went horribly wrong. She was substituted four minutes later.

Not great 😬

New Zealand’s Meikayla Moore has a hat trick against the US…of own goals. 🥴

(via @USWNT) pic.twitter.com/ssB8G5dhyE

— OddsChecker (@OddsCheckerUS) February 20, 2022

I found the commentator’s use of a very extended ‘g-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-a-l!’ highly irritating. He did not do it when she scored the third goal. I hope it was out of sensitivity for her, so as not to be seen as exulting in what was, after all, a mistake and not an achievement to be proud of.

Wikipedia has an origin story for the term ‘hat trick’, a term that originated in cricket but has spread nto many sports and even non-sports.

A hat-trick or hat trick is the achievement of a generally positive feat three times in a match, or another achievement based on the number three.

The term first appeared in 1858 in cricket, to describe H. H. Stephenson taking three wickets with three consecutive deliveries. Fans held a collection for Stephenson, and presented him with a hat bought with the proceeds. The term was used in print for the first time in 1865 in the Chelmsford Chronicle. The term was eventually adopted by many other sports including hockey, association football (soccer), Formula 1 racing, rugby, and water polo.

Recently I have been receiving some chat messages on WhatsApp.

The first read: “Hi, Mr Robert, long time no see. How are you?”

The second read: “Hello Kevin, I’m sorry,I forgot the meeting address I gave yesterday. Can you give me a new address? I’m sorry to disturb you.”

The third read: “Why does my address book have your number, have we done business before?”

They all seemed innocuous, as if people had contacted me by mistake. Usually, when I receive what I think is an email or chat message in error, and I think it may be important to the sender or the actual intended recipient, I reply and alert them that I got it by mistake.

But these three cases had one common feature that aroused my suspicions and that is that all three senders had profile images of young East Asian women. That seemed like too much of a coincidence.
[Read more…]

The pandemic put paid to many in-person social events, such as concerts, theaters, clubs, churches, etc. While many shifted to doing things online, when the pandemic looked like it was easing last summer and these organizations looked to go back to in-person events, they found that many people resisted coming back, either because they feared getting infected or because they found that doing things online was more convenient for them. But this has had a negative financial impact on the organizations.

That is definitely the case for my local bridge club, which is the only social organization to which I belong. It generates revenue to pay the rent and other expenses by charging a table fee for each participant. When the pandemic hit, online bridge tournaments exploded but while those too charge a fee, those provide little or no revenue for the local clubs. When the pandemic seemed to be easing, some people returned to play face-to-face but nowhere near the numbers before and this has resulted in a financial hit for the club.
[Read more…]