When not to hyphenate

One of my favorite errors to point out is an unhyphenated compound adjective. A compound adjective is when two words work together to modify a noun, and you need to connect those two words with a hyphen. If you leave out the hyphen, you get the first word modifying the second word, and this can lead to serious ambiguity. I wrote about missing hyphens recently here. Go look at the article—it contains examples. People don’t usually put in the hyphen if they don’t need it, but I found an unnecessary hyphen today. The article is interesting, too, if you like astronomy.

 By blowing a wind prior to exploding, the white dwarf was able to clear out a huge “cavity,” a region of very low-density surrounding the system. The explosion into this cavity was able to expand much faster than it otherwise would have.

You’re reading along, and suddenly you wonder, “a region of low-density what?” That hyphen told you “compound adjective here” so you expected a noun. Maybe you filled in the noun yourself—low-density vacuum. Or perhaps you re-arranged the whole sentence, “…a very low-density region surrounding…” Or maybe you picked the simplest  solution and removed the hyphen—a region of low density.

Perhaps some science writer has been reading this blog and got over-enthusiastic about hyphens. (I flatter myself. I’ve never gotten a comment from a science writer about anything.) Here’s the picture that goes with the article.

Four telescopes teamed up on this one

Oh—one other thing I need to be curmudgeonly about: Don’t write “prior to” when you mean “before.”

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I don’t generally quote others because what they say is good. I prefer to quote mistakes. But I ran into something the other day that is so good, and so in line with one of my guiding principles, that I have to share it. My humblest thanks to astronomer and writer Phil Plait, and to the American Geophysical Union, where he got this table.  Phil’s article (click his link) is particularly worth reading. He also mentions the original source, an article by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today.

The guiding principle is that you must write for your readership. Before you publish, have an idea of your readers’ knowledge of the subject you’re writing about, and  understand what stake they have in your content; in other words, work at figuring out what they know coming in, and what you want them to take away.  This means, among other things, that you should reflect on your use of specialized words—either define or don’t use vocabulary that your readers might get wrong.

Without further ado:

Click twice to see it full size. Print this and tape it to your wall if you're not a scientist and you read things about science.

Multinational corporations are understandably careful about how they use their logos. They are generally also paranoid about how others use their logos. Herein lies the context for today’s lesson, which is about referring to other places in your writing.

Recently BMW Motorrad, the motorcycle company (which predates their auto division, by the way), has begun enforcing standards for how BMW motorcycle clubs can use the distinctive BMW circular pattern in their club logos. Depending on the personality of the club, this ruling has created more or less of a stir among the members.

The BMW roundel. Am I being illegal to post this? Tell me so, BMW, and I'll take it down.

I happen to belong to both kinds of club. (Yes, simultaneously. See a recent post about using “both.”) Some clubs are like sheep, and they meekly go where they are told. However, imagine a bunch of motorcycle-riding extroverts being told that their club trademark isn’t good enough. Or is too good. Goats are not like sheep! After a lot of online and face-to-face discussion, one member presented a letter on the subject to send to the powers that be. The letter was very well written, and the discussion is ongoing, but one paragraph supplies the material for today’s lesson.

Part of the discussion included the possibility of the club withdrawing from the MOA and the RA, with many members reconsidering the value of their individual participation as well. Though regarded as extreme, the number of those willing to take this step was not insignificant.

Re-read that second sentence. Did you do a double-take? It looks as if the number is both extreme and not insignificant. This would, I suppose, always be true (We call this a tautology, and it’s related to the fallacy of begging the question, but I digress.). Shall we suspect, dear reader, that this writer does not mean to repeat himself? I gave you that first sentence so you could figure out what the writer meant. “Extreme” refers to withdrawal from the national organizations. Now it makes sense to connect the “not insignificant” with the number of people thinking about taking this extreme measure.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to re-write the sentence so its meaning is immediately clear.  My sincere thanks to the Mac-Pac Eating and Wrenching Society for supplying me with the material for today’s lesson, and I close with one of my cardinal rules for writing:

Bad writing must never be justified with the excuse that the reader will figure it out.

Regular readers of this humble site know that I’m a frequent reader of Scientific American. I can generally count on its English being as good as its science, though in recent years I manage to find more examples of how not to do something than I used to. Solecisms in that fine magazine are still few and far between, and perhaps my own increasing experience enables me to pounce on these misshapen gems. This item is a couple months old now, but the error is still a good warning to be careful what word you use.

English has two classifications of verbs, transitive and intransitive. You probably remember from high school English that transitive verbs take a direct object, intransitive verbs don’t, and some verbs can go either way. Sometimes a verb starts out innocently enough, but when you get into the past and perfect tenses, the forms differ depending on whether you want transitive or intransitive.

On to our example, taken from an online article earlier this year, Ten Things You Want to Know about Tornadoes.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the death toll had already raised to 118, ranking the event among the top 10 deadliest U.S. tornadoes of all time.

Our guilty word is “raised.” It’s transitive, but the usage here is intransitive—no direct object.  Here’s how these deceptive words go:

Transitive: raise, raised, raised—I raise the flag, I raised the flag, the tornado had already raised the, um, death toll.

Intransitive: rise, rose, risen—The sun rises, the sun rose yesterday, the death toll had risen every day last week.

Some words are the same in the present tense: “Shine,” for example. I can say the sun shines, and he shines my shoes, but in the past: the sun shone and I shined my shoes. Same thing for the perfect: The sun has shone every day this week, I have shined my shoes every day this week.

Some verbs are even more mixed up, the famous “lie” and “lay” mix-up. “Lie” is intransitive, and it goes lie, lay, lain. “Lay” is the transitive one, lay, laid laid. And let’s don’t even get into falsehoods: lie, lied, lied

We’ve all seen pictures of tornadoes, so here’s a NASA picture of a 39-mile tornado track in Massachusetts

Visible from space!

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Here’s a headline from The Daily Galaxy, a science feed from the Discovery Channel.

Galaxy Devouring Black Holes -1st Evidence Found

by Casey Kazan Daily Galaxy Editorial Staff

The alternate text for the picture is "Supermassive_Black_Hole_001." Presumably it's inside the bright spot at the center of this galaxy.