We’ve been on the road all day, so nothing substantial here tonight — just a few brief items.
First: yesterday’s Thanksgiving prep presented a good example of why punctuation matters, with particular regard to the hyphenation of compound adjectives.
When you string together a pair of adjectives so that the first modifies the second, as for example in the sentence “I disciplined the recalcitrant okapi with a red-hot poker”, there should be a hyphen joining the two so that the meaning is clear to the reader. A phrase such as “a long dead eel” is ambiguous: our piscine corpus delicti might simply be an outsized specimen (a long, dead eel), or it might be an eel of unspecified proportions that passed on ages ago (a long-dead eel).
Which brings us to baby carrots. As it happens, those “baby” carrots you can buy bags of in the produce section aren’t really baby carrots at all — they are ordinary grown-up carrots that have been cut down (presumably on some sort of carrot lathe) to look like babies. The people who sell us these things would rather we not think about that, though, and still want to reel us in with that appealing word “baby” — so what do they do?
It’s very sneaky: they call them “Baby Cut Carrots”. What they really are is “Baby-Cut Carrots”, of course — but the missing hyphen makes all the difference. In a literate society, they’d be hauled into Punctuation Court for false advertising, but this is America.
Second: I don’t know if this has been happening to many of you lately, but it’s been bugging me a couple of times a week now. I’ll switch on my computer and get a pop-up message telling me that there’s an update available for my machine’s Java framework, and asking me if I want to install it. I stop what I’m doing, click OK, grant the necessary permissions, and the installer starts downloading the update. The progress bar creeps along — and when it’s done, up pops another message saying that this software had already been installed on my machine, and asking if I want to install it again anyway.
Of course I don’t. Why the hell doesn’t this work correctly? It’s absolutely trivial for the Java framework to keep track of what version is currently installed, and to communicate in silence with the Oracle Corporation server to find out what the latest available version is, before bothering me about it. What the bejesus is wrong with these people?
Finally, here’s an interesting post (with a comment from your humble correspondent) by Dr Bill Vallicella, in which he says that in his opinion the core problems of philosophy are probably insoluble.
I’m pooped, so that’s all for now.
8 Comments
That Java thing happened to me for a while, but I haven’t been bothered by it in months.
The difference between “red hot” and “baby cut” is that the former is a compound adjective, while in the latter case, “baby” is an adverb modifying the verb “cut.”. Hence a hyphen would be superfluous.
You raise a good point, almost, but it isn’t applicable here: the two cases are analogous. You’re quite right, though, that ordinary adverbs functioning in similar roles don’t need the hyphen.
Adverbs can modify verbs or adjectives. In the phrase “an eviscerated bullfrog”, “eviscerated” functions as an adjective. But you wouldn’t write “a deftly-eviscerated bullfrog”. That’s because “deftly” can only be an adverb; it can’t possibly modify “bullfrog”. No hyphen necessary.
Likewise, the “cut” in “cut carrots” functions as an adjective, not a verb. But “baby” is not an adverb, in any ordinary usage; here it serves to modify the style of cut carrots we’re talking about.
This is a hot poker. What kind of hot poker? It’s a red-hot poker.
These are cut carrots. What kind of cut carrots? They are baby-cut carrots.
Surely you see the ambiguity in “baby cut carrots”: they could be baby carrots that have been cut (which is what the producer wants us to think), or boring old carrots that have been “baby-cut” (which is the far-less-appealing fact of the matter).
The bottom line: if it’s ambiguous, hyphenate.
It’s only just now come to my attention – duty demands I alert Waka readers that just in case you had a Butterball turkey for Thanksgiving – seek medical attention immediately:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOubYo1ETZ8
Well, you may very well be right. Honestly, I have no idea. I just thought I would throw it out there.
Baby cut or not, I hate carrots. As a manly man, my diet consists largely of barbecued ribs, Jack Daniels, and automatuc transmission fluid. Covers all the major food groups.
What about those carrots that have been cut by a baby? Shouldn’t the baby’s parents be punished?
Just sayin …
To me, the funniest part of Malcolm’s post is the idea of a carrot lathe. Does such a device exist? If not, then how do they baby cut (sorry, make that baby-cut) the “grown up” carrots? Oh, wait, or is it “grown-up” carrots? Maybe I should just call them “adult” carrots.
This is how it’s done, apparently.