"In modern times, the hyphen has sown controversy. [Pardis Mahdavi, author of 'Hyphen'] tells the story of how Teddy Roosevelt, in his outrage at losing the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, appealed to Americans’ xenophobia. He was an 'anti-hyphenate.' Mahdavi writes, 'Referring to the hyphen between the name of an ethnicity and the word "American," hyphenism and hyphenated Americanism was seen as a potentially fracturing and divisive force in an America on the brink of war.' Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and Chinese-Americans were all suspect. In 1915, Teddy Roosevelt made some remarks that formed 'a turning point in how the hyphen became demonized both orthographically and politically.' He said, 'The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic.' (Victims of anti-hyphenism might be gratified to know that during the pandemic the equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt was removed from in front of the Museum of Natural History.)"
From "How to Use (or Not Use) a Hyphen/Plus: a brief digression into why The New Yorker hyphenates 'teen-ager'" by Mary Norris (The New Yorker).
Those are 2 very different issues with the hyphen. One has to do with the evolution of a compound word. It's about helping readers see what they're looking at. There must have been a time when people, looking at "wildflower" might have taken an extra moment to decide the second part is "flower" and not "lower" (what are "wildfs"?) The second issue is whether we're going to use this concept at all. To prefer "American" to "Irish-American" is to cast aside the Irish part. It's more like deciding we'll just call all these things "flowers" and not pay attention to whether they are "wild" or not... speaking of xenophobia!
What makes a flower "wild" anyway? All flowers are rooted somewhere and incapable of emigrating:
"Wildflower" is not an exact term. More precise terms include native species (naturally occurring in the area, see flora), exotic or, better, introduced species (not naturally occurring in the area), of which some are labelled invasive species (that out-compete other plants – whether native or not), imported (introduced to an area whether deliberately or accidentally) and naturalized (introduced to an area, but now considered by the public as native).
It's the human point of view or activity that creates an occasion for the concept of wildness.
In the Dolly Parton song "Wildflowers," the "wildflower" is able to migrate: "So I uprooted myself from my homeground and left/Took my dreams and I took to the road...."
I thought I remembered a Disney cartoon that had flowers that pull themselves out of their place and dance around. I'm surprised I found it — "Flowers and Trees" — because the flowers are what these days we'd call racist:
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41 comments:
one man's wildflower, is another man's weed
It's nice to know that "The New Yorker" still cares so much about the elements of style. (Even if they probably can't afford to hire an army of well-trained copy-editors anymore.)
One of the handy wildflower guides is called "Ontario Weeds."
wildfs might be a linux filesystem that just never caught on.
"So I upr ooted mys elf from my homeg round"
upr ooted sounds like fun!
Bumblebee used to be bumble-bee.
The New Yorker is the publication that insists on grafting an umlaut onto perfectly ordinary American words like cooperate and re-elect, so I’m surprised it hasn’t banished the hyphen in favor of the German compound-word approach.
"Bumblebee used to be bumble-bee."
From the linked article: "The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the hyphens from sixteen thousand words. Some words he closed up (“bumblebee”), others he divided in two (“fig leaf”). When people objected, he argued that the general public didn’t understand the rules governing the hyphen and didn’t care enough to learn them."
The evolution is from 2 words to a hyphenated word to one word. It's just a question of where we are and how fast you want to go. The resisters to the final closing up into one word are, I think, concerned that the reader will waste time, that "bumblebee" will involve stopping to think about "bleb" — and is a blebee someone who's been blebbed? — and that figleaf has something to do with a "gleaf" — whatever that is.
A "bum blebee" would be a worthless person who has been blebbed.
The best definition of wildflower is an angiosperm that propagates through its own biological mechanisms. There are many hybrids that are essentially clones that can't reproduce without human intervention, which certainly aren't wild. Maybe we should dispose of wildflower as a concept and replace it with just flowers, using a term like domesticated ornamentals where appropriate.
Teenage is a silly word, really. Teenage and teenagers didn't become a thing until about 1950, when parents who came of age in the Depression and fought in WWII decided, consciously or not, that childhood ought to extend to at least 18 when boys are liable to be conscripted and girls should be aspiring to motherhood. The consequence of that decision was the creation of a vacuum between traditional notions of childhood and maturity. The vacuum needed a name and viola, teen-age, the denizens of the void being teen-agers -- people with mature urges without the autonomy of maturation. The postwar trend seems to have ignited a reverse hormonal cascade because typically teenage mental disabilities now persist into legal adulthood to the point that the typical American needs to about 27 before his brain is reliably logical. Here's an example: What was the age of a typical combat pilot in WWII? Twenty. A flyer past 26 was considered a washout. Today, most are in their thirties and even older. Commercial pilots are older still, many flying regular routes until mandatory retirement. Planes haven't gotten easier to fly, and arial combat is more physically stressful now than in 1945. The reason our aces are older now may have more to do with their brains than their brawn.
The word teenage and its derivatives ought to spend up red flares -- Warning! Not Necessarily Serious Issues Ahead. And it's a funny word, indelibly associated with rancid drive-in cinema, title like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and I Was a Teenage Caveman (and about a half-dozen other MST3K classics).
How did they ever the name bumble-bees in the first place? They seem very purposeful to me. They don't fuck-up very often, not like bumble-biden.
Scott Patton said...
wildfs might be a linux filesystem that just never caught on.
wasn't wildfs one of those Traci Lords movies that we can't watch (on account of because she was 17)?
In the case of the flowers, I think the word "inclusive" would be a better one than "racist."
As for me, count Quaestor among the inveterate hyphenators, shameless and unremorseful. Those short dashes are useful, for example, fuck-up is definitely derived from fuck, and up conveys a sense of random or malign action, as in he's up to something and Jane is up to no good. Contrast that to down, as in let's get down to business and my mother's nightly tagline, knuckled down and finish your homework. Fuck-down is nonsense, but fuck-up is clear as a bell. Fuckup, however, is a bit ambiguous. It could be the concatenation of fuc kup, which may mean something, probably in Basque.
"How did they ever the name bumble-bees in the first place? They seem very purposeful to me."
The original meaning of "bumble" was to make a humming sound. It was onomatopeia.
One of the old meanings for "bum" is "To hum or buzz loudly, like a bee, an object moving rapidly through the air, or a crowd of people talking. Chiefly Scottish after Middle English."
1499 Promptorium Parvulorum (Pynson) sig. ci/2 Bummyn or bumbyn [1440 Harl. 221 bombon] as been, bombiso.
c1586 J. Stewart Poems (1913) 137 The bussie bies..Rycht blythlie buming on the flurist crops....
(from the OED).
"because the flowers are what these days we'd call racist:"
Speak for yourself.
According to Tom petty, wildflowers are associated with freedom.
https://youtu.be/Kw8vBDk880k
Roosevelt was correct and people like Pardis Mahdavi prove it.
Irish-American an interesting case. Derogatory as applied to Catholic peasants, but the majority of immigrants were Protestant, whether from Ulster or elsewhere. Think Ronald Reagan. Became source of pride. Millions of folks put Irish ancestry on census form even when it was a small part. Although that has declined since 1980.
What exactly makes the Black-Eyed Susans depicted in the cartoon racist? They certainly do not appear to have any of the exaggerated features that one would associate with the more common racist tropes.
Hyphenation hype.
Some of my ancestors were from Lower-Hyphenatia (sorry, Lower Hyphenatia), and brought many of their most beloved flower traditions with them. No May-pole dance tiara was complete without a blaze of Piddleweep and a splash of Fartzenblum cunningly woven in.
But nobody does that any more, since, you know . . .
Iforonewelcometheremovalofunneccesarysplitsbetweenourwrittenwords.
Are these big lips on the flowers?
Trust spell-check, or is it spellcheck? No way to keep up with what is a matter of fashion. If the unhyphenated version passes, move on! Next!
Imagine being incapable of grasping Theodore Roosevelt's point. Having to auto-Harrison-Bergeron yourself may be the price you pay to write for the New Yorker, but it's like sticking a ball-point pen deep in your eye or, perhaps your ear.
John McWhorter spends a lot of time listening to old television and radio. He notes a change in accentuation. When the frozen treat was new, people asked for "iced CREAM." Now the ask for "ICE cream."
McWhorter gives other examples as well. I don't know if people ever said "cell PHONE" or "Chinese FOOD," but he's the expert, so maybe he's right.
Hyphenated words are oddities. As the things they describe become more familiar to us, the hyphen tends to disappear. That may be because the words start getting used by people who don't see them in print and don't much care about hyphens. Maybe for Americans, the feeling that we're poking the British lion also comes into play.
¶
Roosevelt had been as quick as other New York politicians to court the Irish, German, and Jewish vote. It was after WWI had started and Americans started to side with their own homelands that he became concerned. But I'd also point out that Roosevelt and Wilson and almost everyone else in the majority culture hoped that the various ethnic groups would become Americans in the great "melting pot." The only multiculturalists were small circles of New York intellectuals frequented by Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen and other radicals, who had complicated relations with TR.
Base-ball originally.
The New-York Historical Society loves and is very protective of its hyphen, which indicates it's been around for a very long time.
That wonderful cartoon wasn't racist. But look at the cis-gendered hetero-normativity! Looking at the credits, I see that there must have been multi-hyphenate creatives involved.
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It looks to me like Disney found the Entwives before Tolkien's Ents lost them (although I'm not sure at what point in the mythos Entkind was devised, before or after 1932).
@Bunkypotatohead
Thanks! Fascinating
"Teenage is a silly word, really. Teenage and teenagers didn't become a thing until about 1950, when parents who came of age in the Depression and fought in WWII decided, consciously or not, that childhood ought to extend to at least 18 ..." Or more accurately, teenagers acquired or controlled enough disposable income that marketers found them of interest. "I consume, therefore I exist" is the unofficial motto of any market-based economy.
But as long as we're finding hyphenated words that lost their hyphen, there's also the morphing of "rail road" into "rail-road" and then railroad. Even the New Yorker would not separate "rail" from "road," yet that single-word "railroad" wasn't really born until the 20th century.
And I'll bet some people still refer to that city as "Buda-Pest."
Can’t really restore the hyphen once it’s been broken.
The Ents hearken back to the Green Man of pagan Britain, and probably other places as well--I'm no mytho-botanist. Part of Tolkien's genius was to adapt and freshen-up archetypes that most moderns have forgotten.
Mark Steyn says that modern America invented two new concepts for the world-- Teenager and Retirement. I would only add that American Boomers are the first cohort to try to combine the two.
Some might say that TR appealed to American's love of country and acceptance of immigration, rather than blindly saying he "appealed to Americans’ xenophobia" about hyphenated descriptions of group identity. But it is so much easier to tear down than to build up, so go ahead, denounce TR, the guy who lost to Wilson, an actual segregationist, eugenicist, and White supremacist.
This is what TR said about Americans and immigrants and the attempt to divide Americans along lines of national origin:
"...We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.
"The children and our children’s children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children’s children will intermarry, one another, your children’s children, friends, and mine. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign countries….The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens."
I'd say that the character of his attitudes and comments is completely distorted by Pardis Mahdavi, whoever that is. I'd also say that Mahdavi is either malicious or stupid.
I’m only semianti-hyphen. Even then only half the time.
"Bumblebee" used to be "humble bee," because of its hum.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/01/humblebee-bumblebee-darwin
Compound modifiers must be hyphenated. A 110-pound (there’s one!) heavy-equipment operator insists.
Althouse: “To prefer "American" to "Irish-American" is to cast aside the Irish part.“
Me: As an Irish-Scottish-Australian married to a Chinese living in Hong Kong (and who lived in New York form3 years)… I always found the American penchant for hyphenating its residents rather strange and uncomfortable. It never seemed quite right to me.
In Australia the closest we got to hyphenating was to refer to “New Australians”. Nowadays, it’s pretty much “Australian”. How does *Not*, say, “casting aside the Irish part” help us understanding the individual in front of us, especially if the “Irish part” is inevitably going to be seen in stereotype.(“oh, you’re Irish! You must be good with words then!”)
Hyphenating us doesn’t help America or the world with the very noble goal of E Pluribus Unum.
The Hyphen: I might go as far as to say it’s a “divisive slash”.
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