Stan CareyMay 4

Saw "nonhabit-forming" in a book and wanted to parse it (nonsensically) as "forming of non-habit".

I wrote about these tricky hyphens once: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/non-life-threatening-unselfconscious-hyphens/

#punctuation #hyphens #semantics #writing #EnglishUsage

Non-life-threatening unselfconscious hyphens

Happy the reader who is unselfconscious about hyphens. Or is it unself-conscious? Un-selfconscious? When we add a prefix to a word that’s already (sometimes) hyphenated, it’s not always obvious whe…

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Show threadsailboat
@stancarey "antiindustrialism" is so awkward! (and makes me wonder if the new yorker has an "iï" ligature)
May 4 at 11:12amWeb
Show threadStan CareyMay 4
@sailboat They use a hyphen in such cases, I think. Yeah, the -ii- isn't pretty! I've seen several examples since in various sources, but most editors see the sense in a hyphen there