Only a little blog entry this time, because I’m really just trying to find out how to use WordPress properly. Hopefully I should have managed to insert a picture above of me wearing my ‘Bah Humbug’ hat, because I’m just about to write something very unfestive – not in an anti-Christmas kind of way – but this post will have a bah-humbuggery feel to it, simply because I’m writing miserable-sod stuff at this festive time of year.

Roy asked me this morning how I would hyphenate ‘unselfsparing’. I pondered awhile and then (annoyingly) gave my answer in three points, as follows…

1.            I wouldn’t use a hyphen here at all. ‘Un-self-sparing’ looks silly. If you were to remove the prefix –un and then hyphenate ‘self-sparing’, you would do so like that, but to follow the same procedure for ‘unself-sparing’ gives you this curious ‘unself’ word, which is confusing. What’s an ‘unself’?

2.            Hyphens, like apostrophes, are unfortunately going out of fashion, because the rules governing their usage are too little understood. It’s a long time since I saw a hyphenated compound adjective (for example, ‘miserable-sod stuff’). Even the hyphen in my name is often disregarded and dropped. A lamentable state of affairs, because punctuation informs the reader exactly how to interpret all the other marks on the paper – it is *not* dispensable decoration[1].

3.            With the advent of hashtags, it’s possible that readers are getting used to mentally processing several words run together like this, so perhaps ‘unselfsparing’ won’t create a problem for readers as it might once have done. #justguessing

I know this is a pompous blog. I know I’m insufferable when it comes to the standard of written English. But I used to be an English teacher, and once you’ve had that red pen in your hand, it’s impossible to put it down.