#hyphens

Use hyphens with “x-year-old” as a noun (“A bus full of seven-year-olds just arrived”) 🚌 or as an adjective (“He is a seven-year-old detective”). 🕵📌

Use “x years old” (without hyphens) after a form of “be,” e.g., is, was, am (“He is seven years old”).

Here are some more examples:

The two-year-old (n.) broke my iPhone. 👶

I was nine years old when I went to my first NBA game. 🏀

My uncle bought me a new iMac to replace my six-year-old (adj.) laptop. 💻

Like there are some really obvious ones like "e-mail" becoming "email". Indeed most e-anything dropped the hyphen. That seems like it could just be society becoming more familiar with it, and using the word more often and dropping it to save a keystroke. But it seems to me that I am always having to tell my spellchecker to accept non-hyphenated versions of compound words, because the hyphenated version just does not look right. This post was spurred by the FF spellchecker claiming it should be "re-implemented" not "reimplemented". As a computer person, the hyphenated version looks absurd.

Of course spellchecker dictionaries aren't always the best, but on occasion if you look it up Merriam-Webster.com or whatever you will find the same sort of thing. Not for "reimplemented" of course you just get the base word "implement" but I have seen other cases where they give a hyphenated version not the unhyphenated.

And, if you look at like newspapers from like, the 30s or something, it seems like you see hyphens all over the place. Like sometimes they hyphenate "to-day" and I don't mean just for a line break. What's up with that?

Image description in alt text.

Vote and then click below to find out the answer...

The ant tracks of time            look like footbridges   made of hyphens        (3 or 4 hyphens per bridge) black and white rainbows       archways above phrases like diacritics      over bottles and jars (these items out of focus, soft focus, just nouns) —similar to a breve ŏ or an inverted breve ô, a Latin small letter with circumflex, or a macron with grave ṑ.

The ant tracks of time         appear near a thesis statement, above a wall of description     a corridor of narration near a subtitle         over the door frame to an example: college students taking a summer course read an essay on noise and distraction by Seneca                    when a bridge of hyphens appears on the third line. It’s followed by a bridge over the second phrase in the twenty sixth, I cannot for the life of me coming long after I have lodgings right over a public bathhouse, which is separated by months from see that quiet is as necessary to a person   as it is usually thought to be, the order different in time, sequence of writing, sequence of reading, as a jackhammer pounds and a crane lifts steel rafters into a skyscraper, a new dorm under construction, a giant statue of a tyrant is erected by a 100 slaves in the crowded streets of Rome. Dust on sandals.                            During bridge repair, the ants cross a plank over the construction site to a small hole in the stanza of a vacant lot leading to an underground crossword puzzle of tunnels & dens,     razed & redacted rooms, repressed & collective corridors          an alternative textbook, an anthology of excerpts        adding to their stash: i) the image of a head fallen from a statue ii) the axle of a torched motive iii) a cornice of a stone statement and are supervised by the white ant that patrols the rows, Control Alt Delete—                     warrior ants, explorer ants, diplomat ants, teaching assistant ants, sales representative ants, dietician ants, second cousin ants, pastor ants, actor ants, architect ants, seamstress and tailor ants, high school sweetheart ants, mercenary ant, beautician ants, translator ant, editor ants, shoe store clerk ants, a fat June bug, street cleaner ant, a bee on its back, waiter ants, mandibles of predatory lending, police tape between pinchers. Fun fact:

Seneca was the tutor of Nero who requested his suicide & Seneca submitted his resignation in a bathtub, not as bad as suffocating minor enemies in rose petals?

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Western Civ 101

Alexandria Peary

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