Compound Adjectives

You see compound adjectives done correctly a lot, so you probably get them correct yourself. You could say it’s a deep-seated habit. Here’s a guy who got it wrong:

Well, his mistake is justified. The rule is that two adjectives (or nouns used attributively) that modify a word together should be hyphenated. So we have the five-second rule about dropped food.

An adverb-adjective pair, though, usually isn’t hyphenated because the adverb modifies just the adjective. For example, we can have a very dark night, or a thoroughly spoiled custard. And “after holiday” is an adverb-adjective pair.

But sometimes that adverb-adjective pair just makes more sense as a compound adjective. “After” is an adverb, but he’s not saying that he’s doing something after the holiday; he’s saying that the bills are the after-holiday type. So here we have the uncommon case of an adverb-adjective compound.

It’s a judgement call, so think when you write.

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I’ve given examples of not being concise before. Here’s another. Don’t do this. (See the previous post.)

Remember the rule: If you can leave a word out, leave it out!

He replaced the original with a metaphor, but still, it’s more concise…

That’s Shakespeare, by the way, in case you didn’t remember the source.

When you make up a word, you get to decide about its spelling. “Lego,” for instance, doesn’t have a plural spelling. If you want a plural, it’s “Lego pieces.”

Turns out “Jedi” is the same way. Next-to-last panel.

I’m not sure whether I already knew that or not…

Here’s a sentence about SpaceX:

Each outfitted with a quartet of arms and pair of nets, it was the first time both ships successfully made it out into the Atlantic for a simultaneous fairing catch attempt, having been foiled by high seas during a prior November outing.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-fairing-recovery-ships-port-return-battle-scars/

Now my rant:

“Prior” means something has more importance, for example, the senior exec has a prior claim on company funds.

“Previous” means earlier in time. So that sentence has the wrong word!

PS—”Successfully” in the second line is unnecessary. If the boats made it to the destination, the trip was by definition successful. You can’t have “unsuccessfully made it.”