A Unique Word?

I wonder if anyone on this forum suffered being taught the Initial Training Alphabet (I.T.A.) in the late 60's / 70's

as I did ? The experiment was a dismal failure that condemned many children to a life time of misspelling . Thank heavens for 'speel cheack'

Guy

I know that one. Back in the sixties our English master gave us a sentence to punctuate which had the word 'had' eleven times in a row:

The rest of the class while Galahad had had had had had had had had had had had the masters approval

George

I know that one. Back in the sixties our English master gave us a sentence to punctuate which had the word 'had' eleven times in a row:

The rest of the class while Galahad had had had had had had had had had had had the masters approval

George

Isn't the point about words that they should all be unique? A quality which I recognise is not at all common in English, though.

PS highhanded

Tim

Edited By Tim Stevens on 27/04/2019 17:12:52

You can get anything you want with the common current fashion of portmanteau-ing words. I'm sure you can find any of them on the internet too. Doesn't make them representative. Perhaps people have a phobia about hyphens.

Personally, it's always been "cross section" (or perhaps "cross-section"  ) . And "mass spectrometer" was just that when I dealt with them.

My wife does "cross-stitch"

(Another phantom smiley edit)

Edited By Bandersnatch on 27/04/2019 17:44:14

I joined Junior School in 1964 and did not use it, but my sister a couple of years younger did.

But as computers did not use the 45 character ITA but rather the ASCII character set imported from the US this would probably have killed it from the early 1980s if it had not died out before then.

Yes, I'd probably do that too, but it doesn't mean the alternative is wrong.

Hyphens are becoming less common. For example, 'shotgun' has now largely replaced the hyphenated or split variants. But I think it's OK to be pluralistic...

Edited By Mick B1 on 27/04/2019 20:08:24

Was it this one George?

The publican of the Pig and Whistle ordered a replacement sign for his establishment. Upon viewing the new sign, he expressed dissatisfaction to the sign maker. He asserted that there was too much space between pig and and and and and whistle.

Sam

There was a crossslide in and article I was editing, it becma e cross-slide but I thought it might stimulatean interesting discussion!

Withheld is certainly in most of the dictionaries, Collins here and Longman, Merriam Webster amongst others online (I can't be bothered to go downstairs to find an OED).

Hyphenation tends to fade with time.

Neil

.

Interesting note from the Wikipedia page;

[quote]

The use of the hyphen in English compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. Reflecting this changing usage, in 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly) and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole).^[5]The increasing prevalence of computer technology and the advent of the Internet have given rise to a subset of common nouns that might have been hyphenated in the past (e.g. "toolbar", "hyperlink", "pastebin".

[/quote]

MichaelG.

.

P.S. ... the modern [?] form, which uses upper-case letters within a concatenation, seems appropriate in the case of CrossSlide

I think that's sometimes called 'CamelCase' 'cos of humps in the middle? But it's mostly used of text relating specifically to computing and especially proprietary trade names for software packages or components thereof. I'd expect a little circled 'R' in superscript every time the word appeared in the manual - have to be a pretty damn special crossslide to justify it...

Adding to the confusion is the general rule that compound modifiers take a hyphen whereas a compound noun does not. So we would have "Hit the cross slide with a hammer" but "Hit the cross-slide handle with a hammer".

I'm wondering if it was originally Across-slide, which has become shortened to Cross-slide, but should really be written as 'cross-slide.

That's the one I know. Are you ready to tackle Galahad next ?

George

George

Well, Chapman's 'Workshop Technology' from 1946 uses 'Cross-slide' (inc. initial capitalisation), but then he also uses 'Slide-ways', which today we'd usually combine.

George - Re Galahad ... I wouldn't know where to start (or finish), although I'm reminded of a sentence which starts with ...

I is ......

I is the ninth letter of the alphabet.

Sam

Today I had a problem with freak weather when my ship's boat shipping boats on a BOAT shipped ships and boats and sank. Ok sorry that should have been in the what you did today thread but you can clearly understand my predicament.

I heard there was a problem on the M25 when lorries shed loads of shed loads of shed loads of shed loads of sheds.

Neil

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 29/04/2019 09:57:57

Nobody has yet to ask if misspelt is missspelt...........