Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / October 2003

I agree.

 

But your comment drifts away from the reason for the thread,
"Charles"'s report that he couldn't find "cutting-edge" in
any dictionary.  Is it your intent to suggest to Charles
that he can find nouns in a dictionary but not adjectives?

If you want to start another thread in which the topic under
discussion is hyphenation of compound adjectives, you're
free to do so, but the subject has already been beaten to
death in AUE.

Anyway, "cutting edge" *is* an adjective if it appears in
the predicate.  ("His performance was cutting edge.")

It looks strange to me, too, when you quote it out of
context.  

That usage -- the hyphenation of a compound noun to avoid
ambiguity or false scent -- has also been discussed in AUE,
and I don't remember any comments from you at that time.
Your out-of-context quotation doesn't show the potential
false scent.

Does the presence or absence of a hyphen make something harder to find in
dictionaries? I would have expected a hyphen to be treated the same as a
space for purposes of dictionary alphabetization (and if I'm not
mistaken, most dictionaries treat the space as equivalent to the null
character). Or do online dictionaries fail to return results without
hyphens if your search string contains a hyphen?

-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

[...]

Now, I guess, English 103:

That is true of essentially all compound adjectives.  The
entire point of hyphenating them is to show that they are to be
taken as a single adjective when confusion, however fleeting,
is otherwise possible (that is why we do not need or use the
hyphen when the first word is self-evidently an adverb).  

Adherent compound adjectives would often be ambiguous were
there no hyphenation rule--is a "yellow window envelope" a
yellow-colored window-type envelope or a window-type envelope
(color unspecified) with a yellow window?--so we make the rule:
hyphenation compounds.  Thus, "a yellow-window envelope" is
easily distinguished from "a yellow window envelope".[1]  But
we write "a rapidly growing problem" because "rapidly", as an
adverb, inherently cannot generate such confusion.

In the case of appositive compound adjectives, the possibility
for error is minimal, and we do not generally hyphenate them
("It is a poem well translated" versus "It is a well-translated
poem").

One would think that all guides would discuss that use.  But
the circumstances that call for it are limited and can be
defined relatively easily: when the combination of words taken
as a whole yields a meaning *distinctly different* from the
meaning if they are considered individually (a "dancing-girl"
is something very different from "a dancing girl").  

Combinations that simply add their meanings in a reasonable way
("movie house") neither want nor take a hyphen, precisely
because we might otherwise mistake them for a term that is
supposed to mean something new.  (And, rather obviously, "the
cutting-edge" is not, as a noun, something differing in meaning
from "the cutting edge".)

Recall that the point of all this is not to enable some few
with excellent memories to win trivia contests: it is to make
our written English as clear as possible.  Thus, to breach the
established conventions arbitrarily, as by hyphenating the
compound noun "cutting edge"--which might well cause it to be
mistaken at first eyescan for an adjective--runs directly
contrary to clarity: it needlessly muddles.

So the simple rules of English 103:

 . hyphenate adherent compound adjectives (unless the leading
   term is an adverb);

 . do not hyphenate adherent adjectives that are not compound;

 . do not hyphenate appositive compound adjectives; and,

 . hyphenate compound nouns _only_ when the compound has a new
   meaning not conveyed by the natural addition of the
   individual elements' meanings.

Not so hard, is it?

[1] And it is a _rule_: we _always_ hyphenate compound
adjectives, even when we see no likely confusion ("a red-hot
mama"), because unless compound hyphenation _is_ a rule, it is
useless as guidance (Did he mean those as separate adjectives
or did he just fail to see the ambiguity?)

Woody Wordpecker at <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> says:

An example of each of those two contexts will help your explanation.

Which guide?

Please give an example of false scent caused by the absence of a hyphen in
"cutting edge" when it's used as a noun.

Anyway, you now seem to be trying to contradict the bald comment that you
made to Charles about misspelling: "You misspelled it in the sense that you
hyphenated it [. . .]."

That example of yours was: "For example, if you say "The engineer is busy
working on the cutting edge of his field", the reader after reading as far
as "cutting" may form the momentary image of an engineer who is busy cutting
something with a pair of scissors.  A hyphen in "cutting-edge" would avoid
that momentary distraction."

You're making that up. There's no false scent, and there's no distraction
caused by anything other than the pain felt by the reader or the listener
when being assaulted by the hack phrase itself. The presence of a hyphen in
your example will do nothing to help the reading, and nothing to help the
listening if the words are spoken. We're supposed to be talking about
universal standard English, and universal standard English makes no demand
for a hyphen in that sentence---a sentence that you invented as an example
of the need for a hyphen in a phrase that you told Charles would be
_misspelt_ if it had a hyphen. You've lost me.

My point was different from any point that you were trying to make to
Charles. My point was that you unjustifiably tried to correct Charles's
spelling. The phrase in question must be equally easy to find in any
dictionary regardless of whether it has a hyphen, and Charles did not go so
far as to identify the hyphened "term" either as a noun or as an adjective.

Please give an example of such difficulty in one of those dictionaries.

I'm now repeating myself, but I must emphasise that the presence or the
absence of a hyphen wouldn't have prevented Charles from finding every entry
for the phrase in _any dictionary that mentioned the phrase either as a noun
or as an adjective or both_. My copy of the 1995 edition of the _Collins
English Dictionary_ has it only as a noun, but we must blame that dictionary
for failing to recognise the phrase's equally common adjectival use. My copy
of the _1994 edition of _Webster's New World Dictionary_ ("third college
edition") has only the unhyphened form and only some nounal meanings, but
doesn't get around to saying "n" to signify explicitly that it recognises
the phrase only as a noun. My copy of the 1993 edition of the _Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary_ says the phrase is both a noun and an adjective,
but typically for a dictionary it gives no advice about punctuation. No
general dictionary of the English language has ever set out to be a guide to
punctuation.

Don't worry, Woody---these are my final words in this fascinating thread.

--
Quentin Burward.

[After I wrote about COD9]

In general, perhaps not. I'd argue, though, that when the first
element of a compound adjective is the "-ing" form of a verb, that
compound should always be hyphenated, regardless of its position in
the sentence.

Let's pretend that, like "cutting edge", the noun "wishing well" is
used as an adjective, to mean, say, "superstitiously and falsely
believed to be effective". First, as occurred with "cutting edge",
it's used only attributively, and is always hyphenated:

    The government attempted to calm the public outcry by
    announcing a programme of little more than wishing-well
    measures.

Then, though, as also occurred with "cutting edge", people started
(however unwisely is irrelevant; what's done is done) using it
copulatorily:

    An opposition spokesman said, "Their policy is wishing
    well in the extreme and fails to address the core problems."
   
Don't you think every copyeditor on the planet would hyphenate that?

For me, the same -- and for exactly the same reason -- applies to
"cutting edge". Whenever I see "is cutting [...]", I'm already on the
wrong trail by the time I get to "edge" -- I'm expecting "taxes" or an
adverb. When I see "is cutting-[...]", howver, I'm kept on the right
track.

--
Ross Howard

The star you put there seems a little extreme for something that appears
in 25 out of the first 68 Google hits for "technology is cutting-edge"
(Google treats the hyphen the same as a space; false hits like
"...technology. Is cutting-edge..." were discounted.) That's not a
majority, but it's far from unattested, which is what the star should mean.

I obviously can't say anymore that this reflects the standard in any
widespread sense, but I still think "cutting-edge" looks better after a
copula than "cutting edge". My rationale here, I think, is that
"silky-smooth" and "cutting-edge" are qualitatively different kinds of
compound adjectives.

My brain wants to parse "silky smooth" as being an adverb plus an
adjective, rather than two adjectives. (If I try to convince myself that
"silky" is an adjective, I start wanting to see "silky-smooth" even
non-attributively.) That is to say, what we've got in "silky smooth"
really is two words, one of which is modifying the other; the word that's
modified is already an adjective even before the collocation takes place.
The only reason it has to appear as "silky-smooth" attributively is that
English (under most circumstances) only allows single-word attributive
adjectives. So if you're going to use a multi-word adjective phrase
attributively, you have to convert it into a single word by way of
hyphens.

"Cutting-edge" on the other hand, is indecomposable as an adjective. That
is to say, it doesn't contain any adjectival subpart that's modified,
complemented, or what have you by any other subpart. It consists of a
two-word noun, converted lock-stock-and-barrel into a single adjective.
And the fact that it can't be decomposed and retain any adjectivehood
makes me want to write it as a single word (i.e., with hyphens); writing
it with no hyphens makes it look (to me) like the two words "cutting" and
"edge" ought to be put together somehow to make an adjective phrase, and
that's not what happens. You can also think of it as though an
(invisible) suffix is being added to the noun "cutting edge" to convert
it to an adjective; the suffix can't reach across white space so a hyphen
is needed.

Now, Chomsky made a career out of describing his own grammatical
intuitions and saying that they constituted Universal Grammar for all
speakers of all languages. I'm not trying to do that here; all I'm trying
to do here is describe my own hyphenation intuition, which obviously
isn't shared that widely, and how it isn't as inconsistent as it might
appear.

-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

These comments remind me of the MBA elective proposed by my colleagues
who teach retail management. (Humour is an important part of their
defence against the sneers of those who think their subject is
insufficiently academic.) They offered a course in "Management by
Cliche" which included sessions on "Retail is Detail", "Thinking Outside
the Box" and a long list of other shopworn expressions.

Sure, but "trite" is so overdone (as is "soooooo"). And "overdone" is
the kiss of death (or "kissadeath" in my dialect).

By the way, didn't you say something uncomplimentary about Mission
Statements? Believe it or not, I agree. A company's _reputation_, good
or bad, reveals its true "Mission." A written Mission Statement is,
therefore, an exercise in the artistry of flimflam, or a case of
self-delusion, or a sinful waste of time. Probably all three.

(Did I say IMO? No? Well, IMO.)

Maria Conlon

On 26 Oct 2003, Woody Wordpecker wrote
 

 

Retired.  (I heard it took synergy with it to the rest home.)

Sorry, I assume you mean A... H... Dictionary, but I'm not familiar with it.

I would think the dictionary is just reporting observed usage without
making a value judgement about it. I was offering a value judgement
as my opinion.

Although on second reading, neither of those definitions appears to
accord with the business-speak fashion of the past few years, e.g.

"However, there are ways that you can facilitate that process and
leverage local press coverage into national business"

"How to Leverage Instant Messaging With millions of people"

"Canada to leverage Indian skills in knowledge drive"

(examples taken from a Google search)

It is that kind of usage which grates so.

Exploit, use, take advantage of, build upon. "To leverage" just sounds
awful to my ears, but perhaps that's because I'm British, not American,
and an engineer, not a marketeer or manager.

Cheers,
Tony

Very wise advice in general, though the 0.x versions of the
Mozilla Firebird browser have been remarkably and pleasantly
stable and useful (I am on 0.7 now).  Is there any other way to
browse?