The Wrong Headline Got the Hyphen

Looking at today's Wall Street Journal, I spotted two front-page headlines that Paul R. Martin is likely to brand "heads below the rest" in the next Style & Substance.

Diet-Doctor
Atkins's Estate
In a Scandal

He's diet doctor Atkins. No hyphen. The phrase "diet doctor" is not an adjective or a modifier; it's simply a noun that helps define another noun. There's probably a fancy grammatical term for that, but I'd call it a label. Diet doctor Atkins, copy editor Walsh, baseball player Bonds. All labels. "Steroid abuser Bonds" would not get a hyphen (still a label), but "steroid-abusing Bonds" would -- there's a modifier.

Then, a couple of inches away, I see this:

All Harman Investors
Have Chance for a Stake
In KKR, Goldman Deal

A comma used that way in a headline means "and." I suppose in some sense you have a "KKR and Goldman deal," but that's just not how such a thing is supposed to be punctuated. It's a KKR-Goldman deal. Ali-Frazier fight, Tigers-Yankees game, Burton-Taylor marriage, KKR-Goldman deal.

Under the fairness doctrine, I'm obligated to point out that my paper also made a front-page hyphenation error today. From the article on Stephen Hawking's ride on the vomit comet:

Dressed in dark blue flight suits, Hawking and an entourage of caretakers boarded a Boeing 727 that roared out over the ocean and carved huge parabolic arcs in the sky, creating for passengers the "zero-gravity" effect of being in space.

Those blue flight suits sure were dark! That's not what the writer meant. He meant the color of the flight suits was dark blue. Dark-blue flight suits.

Bad Comma

Is the comma in this sentence OK? "One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and involved throwing hammers and attacks with a chainsaw."

I think it's wrong, but I see this everywhere. Did I miss something?

Short of the dreaded comma splice it's hard to pin the word wrong on anything involving comma placement, but I wouldn't have used that comma.

The writer, or perhaps an editor, saw two instances of and in quick succession and moved to tidy things up. Perhaps the writer or editor confused that sentence with a series -- even those of us who stylistically eschew the serial comma are supposed to use it if an item in the series contains a conjunction (toast, juice, and ham and eggs) -- but two items do not a series make. What's going on in that sentence is a compound predicate, and compound predicates are not supposed to get commas.

As I said in a longer discussion of this topic, a technically incorrect "take a breath" comma is sometimes appropriate, but in this case there are better alternatives. Among them:

One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, and it involved throwing hammers and attacks with a chainsaw.

One was about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather; it involved throwing hammers and attacks with a chainsaw.

One of them, about a fight between a stepson and his stepfather, involved throwing hammers and attacks with a chainsaw.

Close-Enough Hyphenation

In the phrase long-term care insurance, shouldn't there be a second hyphen -- long-term-care insurance? It's insurance for long-term care, not care insurance of the long-term variety, right?

Technically, yes, but that's one of those that fall into the "close enough" category in this hyphen-averse world. In a sense it is care insurance of the long-term variety, and so I don't think that's too much of a tragedy in any publication that isn't so strict that it would print ice-cream cone or high-school student, which is to say most publications.

Contrast that with something like anti-child abuse program, where the single hyphen would be inexcusable.

(Have a question? Send it along and I just might answer it in this space. Let me know whether you want me to include your name/location/affiliation or none of the above.)

Feeling Testy?

People often ask me where they can find a copy-editing test. It's not an easy question, because by and large such tests are proprietary and hard to grade, but here, at the University of Kansas site, is a classic from the late and legendary John Bremner. (He'd be even more legendary in my book if he had alerted somebody to the fact that "KU" doesn't stand for "University of Kansas.")

Ho, Ho, Ho!

Not long ago this was a burning issue before the Washington Post copy chiefs, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why:

Is the plural of ho . . . hos? Ho's? Hoes? None of the above?

How often, I thought, could this possibly come up?

Well, it sure has come up a lot in the past week, thanks to serial A-hole Don Imus. I favor hos, but I thought it was a close call (see do's and don'ts and noes) and I didn't even remember how the debate was resolved until I started researching this entry.

The good news is, nearly everyone agrees with me. That is, they agree with me on hos, though my feeling that it was a close call seems to have been knocked down. The near-unanimity is rather startling. Only the Kansas City Star has used hoes in reporting the Imus quote, and that was only once. Ho's does show up, mainly in New York City, but the papers that use it tend to go back and forth between that and hos. Here's the breakdown among what LexisNexis considers the major U.S. newspapers (asterisks indicate occasional inconsistency, as opposed to the coin-flip inconsistency of the last group):

HOS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Baltimore Sun
Boston Globe*
Boston Herald
Buffalo News
Charlotte Observer
Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Tribune
Christian Science Monitor
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Denver Post
Detroit Free Press
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Grand Rapids Press*
Hartford Courant
Houston Chronicle
Kansas City Star*
Los Angeles Times
Miami Herald
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel*
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Newark Star-Ledger
Newsday
Orlando Sentinel
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Rocky Mountain News
Sacramento Bee
St. Petersburg Times
San Antonio Express-News
San Jose Mercury News
South Florida Sun-Sentinel*
USA Today
Washington Post

HO'S
Dallas Morning News
New York Post*
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

HOS AND HO'S, HOW TO DECIDE?
New York Daily News
New York Times
San Francisco Chronicle