Tennis-courts

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Marius Hancu - 09 May 2009 07:22 GMT

Hello:

Is this hyphenated 'tennis-courts' BrE? I was surprised by it.

---
The several hard tennis-courts in this garden, which had been taken over
as a park by the municipality, had never been properly kept up [...]

A Dance to the Music of Time, Spring, by Anthony Powell, p. 96
----

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Thanks.
Marius Hancu

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Ian Jackson - 09 May 2009 16:13 GMT

>Hello:
>
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
>A Dance to the Music of Time, Spring, by Anthony Powell, p. 96
>----

Not normally. But I'm a great believer in "If in doubt, put it in"!

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Ian

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Paul Wolff - 09 May 2009 23:08 GMT

>In message <gu3lhd$od0$1@aioe.org>, Marius Hancu <NOSPAM@videotron.ca>
>writes
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
>>
>Not normally. But I'm a great believer in "If in doubt, put it in"!

It fits the period, or at least it gives the impression of fitting the
period, and the book is put forward as a personal account of the times
of the narrator (about 1924 for that episode, I think). So even if the
hyphen was no longer used there when Powell actually wrote that chapter,
he may well have decided to put in so as to persuade the reader to see
it as a contemporary account.

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Paul

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Joe Fineman - 10 May 2009 02:07 GMT

> Is this hyphenated 'tennis-courts' BrE? I was surprised by it.
>
> ---
> The several hard tennis-courts in this garden, which had been taken
> over as a park by the municipality, had never been properly kept up
> [...]

It's not so much British as old-fashioned. Compounds of the form
noun+noun->noun used to be routinely hyphenated (dining-room,
work-place), but recent publishers have almost done away with
such hyphens, making them either a space or nothing (dining room,
workplace). I am not in sympathy with this change; it has created an
endless series of puzzles that send one to the dictionary, often in
vain (shoe box or shoebox?), but it is too late to rebel.

I am gratified to note that so late as 1970, the Oxford University
Press (New York) let George R. Stewart title his charming dictionary
"American Place-Names". He must have been one of the last to get away
with that.

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--- Joe Fineman joe_f@verizon.net

||: Science is a way of trying not to fool ourselves. :||

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Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

Tennis-courts