"Yesteryear’s 'ball-point pen' became the 'ballpoint,' 'wild-flowers' evolved into 'wildflowers,' and 'teen-age” found acceptance as 'teenage' in most outlets..."

"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:

"Finally, here comes omega (ω). Everybody knows it signals the end. Although we are still near the middle of the alphabet, albeit on the downhill side, people are noticing that Greek has two 'O's."

Writes Mary Norris, in "A Linguistic Look at Omicron/What is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters?" 

Omega means “big O.” (Get it? O-mega?) Omicron means “little O.” O-micron. The Greek micro, or “small,” has given us “microbes,” “microscopes,” and “microminis.” Mega, Greek for “big,” has come into English in “Mega Millions,” “mega-threat,” and “megalopolis.” If the repercussions from little old omicron have been so catastrophic, what are we to expect from big bad omega? 

Before panic sets in, a note on pronunciation: “small O” and “big O” refer less to the size and shape of the written letters (omega is an omicron with big feet: Ω) than to their sounds. They are vowels with short and long values. Though there is no universal agreement about it, many American classicists pronounce omicron with a short “o,” as in “om,” and omega with a long “o,” like an Irish surname: O’Mega. 

Norris links to a Mother Jones article from a few weeks ago, "I Asked Seven Classics Experts How to Say 'Omicron.' Come Down the Rabbit Hole With Me." Excerpt:

My first call was to David Sider, an American scholar with a terrific Bronx accent, in whom I found an equally frustrated ally. “You’ve called the right person!” he exclaimed. “I was driving in a car the other day, listening to the radio, and hit two different people on two different episodes say ‘ah-ma-CRON. And that’s wrong.”

“Kind of like the French president?” I asked. “Ah, Macron!”

“Yes, yes, exactly,” he said. “I’ve been bothered.”

"Horticulturalists have a mantra: right plant, right place. For the forty-two-year-old photographer and professional gardener Conrad Ventur..."

"... that place is Participant, where his unassuming, heartfelt exhibition 'A Green New Deal'... includes a working greenhouse filled with a hodgepodge of succulents, bonsai, and carnivorous plants.... Ventur is best known for his indelible portraits of the late Warhol superstar Mario Montez, but an earthier muse is the scene-stealer here: the pathbreaking lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who looks elated, shortly before her death, early last year, to be climbing a tree."

So writes Andrea K. Scott in The New Yorker, where the copy editing is supposed to be rigorous. It's one reason I subscribe, and I have read the book "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen" by Mary Norris, the eminent copy editor of The New Yorker.

Do you see the egregious error in the quoted passage?!

There is at least one other thing that needs better editing.

A "master class in biased reporting"? Seems like pretty normal biased reporting to me.

Let me be direct and clear: This article is a master class in biased reporting and editing. There are so many subtle ways that it seeks to manipulate the reader into taking Franken's side.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 22, 2019

One reason I rarely do Twitter is that it doesn't look right to me to make comments on things you don't link to or even cite. You just assume people know what you're talking about. It seems a tad mental. If you did this in real-life conversations, it would be weird.

Embedding these 2 tweets on my blog, I now feel that I should explain the context and link to the Jane Mayer article about Al Franken (yes, it's Al Franken, not some other Franken). Of course, if I were writing a mainstream news article, I'd have to say Al Franken, the former Senator from Minnesota who was... oh, it's too tedious to spell out.... I enjoy the freedom of not having to do that, but I resist the freedom of Twitter, to just blurt out my latest thought with no preface, no context.

Anyway, we talked about the Al Franken article yesterday, here. The idea that it wouldn't be biased never crossed my mind, so it's hard for me to see anything as subtle. The interesting question is therefore why Nate Silver chose this occasion to call out a journalist for using skill to manipulate readers. And Silver's tweet is just as much of a "master class" in bias, just as "subtle" in its effort to bias readers.

Silver sees the use of quotation marks around "zero tolerance" as a nudge to think of Kirsten Gillibrand as "sloganeering" or hypocritical, but did he even check to see whether The New Yorker is simply following its own convention of copy editing? I searched The New Yorker archive for "zero tolerance" and "#MeToo" and found:

"The Transformation of Sexual-Harassment Law Will Be Double-Faced," by Jeannie Suk Gersen (December 2017): "And, echoing their successful student counterparts over the past several years, the men will claim in court that the pressure to implement a 'zero tolerance' policy against harassment led employers to act without sufficient investigation or proper process, motivated by the employees’ male gender."

"Can Hollywood Change Its Ways?/In the wake of scandal, the movie industry reckons with its past and its future" by Dana Goodyear (January 2018): "In the past, men who got caught used a magic spell: 'I am an alcoholic/sex addict and am seeking treatment.'... [T]he magic spell no longer works. In its place is the righteous meme of 'zero tolerance.'"

Now, it might be that The New Yorker generally disapproves of a "zero tolerance" approach, but would that cause it to adopt quotation marks? The New Yorker has a special reputation for copy editing. I've read the copy editor's book, "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen." Excerpt:

Lu taught me to do without hyphens when a word is in quotation marks, unless the word is always hyphenated; the quotation marks alone hold the words together, and it would be overkill to link them with a hyphen as well. (Capital letters and italics work the same way.) Eleanor once mystified me by putting a hyphen in “blue stained glass” to make it “blue-stained glass.”

That may explain why New Yorker articles about Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy leave off the quotation marks:

"What the Bible Really Says About Trump’s Zero-Tolerance Immigration Policy" by James Carroll (June 2018): "Attorney General Jeff Sessions invokes the Bible to justify the heinous zero-tolerance immigration policy, which incarcerates children."

"Will Anyone in the Trump Administration Ever Be Held Accountable for the Zero-Tolerance Policy?" by Jonathan Blitzer (August 2018): "The failure of the zero-tolerance policy has done little, if anything, to diminish the group’s standing; on the contrary, Miller has only seemed to gain allies in the government."

I strongly doubt that The New Yorker disapproves of Gillibrand's staunch feminism more than Trump's approach to illegal immigration.

But there is a fine point of punctuation here. When you write "zero-tolerance policy," you're using the phrase "zero tolerance" as an adjective, and — as the indented passage above explains — you need to "hold the words together." You could use either quote marks or a hyphen, and I think the idea is that the hyphen looks less fussy. But in the quote about Gillibrand — "a feminist champion of 'zero tolerance' toward sexual impropriety" — "zero tolerance" isn't used as an adjective, so a hyphen isn't an option — unless you reword it as "a feminist champion of a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual impropriety."

Since rewording is an option, it was possible to avoid the "air quotes" effect of making it seem as though Gillibrand is some sort of demagogue. But to switch to a hyphen would be to treat #MeToo non-tolerance the same as Trump's immigration non-tolerance. Would that improve the treatment of Gillibrand? Maybe these are 2 different ways of subtly attacking someone, and there's some sexism in the choice. Gillibrand is disparaged as ditzy — using a dumb slogan. Trump is disparaged as a cruel oppressor.

Enough of that. Here's something subtle that I think neither Silver nor Mayer considered. To champion "'Zero tolerance' toward sexual impropriety" is NOT zero tolerance! The word "impropriety" drains the absolutism from "zero." What are we going to call "improper"? It's subjective, and the answer can be: Whatever we won't tolerate at all. Flexible.

And since we've come this far, we might as well see the subjectivity and flexibility in "sexual" and "tolerance." Is intensely sniffy neck-nuzzling "sexual"? Analysis of Joe Biden's behavior toward young girls has generally led to the answer no. And "tolerance" can mean doing nothing at all. Suppose we eradicate "tolerance" — and I do take "zero" seriously. That could mean only that we stop doing nothing at all. We could end the state of tolerance by simply expressing disapproval, something as mild as: I see what you're doing and I find it unacceptable.

Beware of "Dog."

Some Brooklyn "CAT" has learned to stencil. pic.twitter.com/3HzI8fOJpm

— Mary Norris (@MaryNorrisTNY) February 16, 2019

"I hated the word 'feminine.' It reminded me of a tampon or a panty liner."

Said Tonya Harding, whose "sin" — as the NYT puts it — "was not being the Disney princess Barbie doll that the Figure Skating Association demanded of its skaters."

The NYT article is "Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now/In the movie, 'I, Tonya,' the disgraced figure skater looks back on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal and her struggles to tell her side of the story" by — what a spectacular name! — Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

“You all disrespected me and it hurt. I’m a human being and it hurt my heart,” she said, her hand karate chopping the table lightly with every word for emphasis. “I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow. That’s what I have to say.”

Yes, but the world is different now, I tell her.... Look at Monica Lewinsky and how we treated her. Just yesterday I saw maybe the seventh essay comparing her with you, how rough the 90s were on women who needed support and ——

“Monica Lewinsky?” she asked, incredulous, using a modified version of the same obscene phrase involving male anatomy that she had just said she would never use.* “In the Oval Office! You don’t think that there’s something wrong with that? She disrespected the country.”

But you were both so young, I said. And the press was so hard on you before they’d heard the full ——

Stop it, she said. Don’t compare her to Monica Lewinsky. She is nothing like Monica Lewinsky, she said. Tonya wasn’t making mistakes like a privileged person who gets an internship at the White House....

I'm interested in Brodesser-Akner's use of the double em-dash. That would look crazy to me, but I recently read — in "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen " — that Charles Dickens had a penchant for the double em dash:

In Dickens I discovered something unexpected: an abundance of double dashes— two-em dashes, closed up. “Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way——” He uses the double dash in dialogue, to convey an interruption compounded by a threat. The double dash is strangely expressive, packing an extra dose of suspense, as if the speaker, rendered inarticulate by emotion, were resorting to his fists. And, when you think about it, suspense is what punctuation is all about: how is the author going to finish the sentence?

___________________

* Earlier in the article, we're told that in the movie, there's a scene with Tonya confronting skating judges, showing that "she gets frustrated and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy. Never happened, she said. 'I would never say that.'" I guess I could look up the movie dialogue. The "obscene directive" must be "Blow me." Or is it "suck my dick"? Oh! I looked it up. It's "suck my dick." Here's Vulture, "A Fact-checked Guide to I, Tonya":

Did Tonya tell a judge to “suck my dick” after the judge criticized her outfit? No. [the actress playing Harding, Margot] Robbie said in a late-night interview that the line was made up, but that when Harding saw the movie, she apparently wished she had said it. Harding did, however, tell the judge who criticized her outfit that unless she could come up with $5,000 to buy Harding a new costume she could “stay out of my face.”

I wonder whether the New Yorker's "comma queen" considered whether to put a hyphen in "Adventures in Geriatric Dogsitting."

Remember, we were just talking about the difference between "dog-lover" and "dog lover," as discussed by Mary Norris, in "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen":

A dog-lover is one who loves dogs; the dogs are the object of his love. James Thurber was a dog-lover. A dog lover, without the hyphen, is still a dog—the Tramp, say, in Lady and the Tramp.... A bird-watcher is a watcher of birds; a bird watcher would be a bird that keeps an eye on things.... In 'star fucker,' without the hyphen, each word has equal weight: a fucker who is a star. But in 'star-fucker' the hyphen tips the weight to the first element, the object (star) of the activity embodied in the noun (fucking).

Mary Norris is the long-time copy editor at The New Yorker, which is what I'm reading when I get to this nice comic by Gabrielle Bell titled "Adventures in Geriatric Dogsitting." I assume it's about the travails of an older person taking on the task of dogsitting. But, no, it's about a youngish person who is taking care of old dogs. I'm thinking a hyphen — or something — would have put me on the right track. Adventures in Geriatric-Dog Sitting? No, that's no good. Dogsitting is a funny word, and sitting seems like the wrong word if it's not compounded with whatever's getting sat.

The problem is more profound. Unlike the examples in the "dog-lover" paragraph, the noun modified by "geriatric" is not a thing that can grow old. Dogsitting is a practice and not an animal (canine or human). It doesn't matter whether the person or the dog is elderly. The sitting is not geriatric. You've got to disaggregate the dog from the sitting to use the adjective. I'd like to recommend scrapping that title and elevating the first line of the comic to the title position: "How did I find myself the custodian of two geriatric dogs?"

But you see what they're clinging to? "Adventures in Geriatric Dogsitting." It's a play on the movie title "Adventures in Babysitting." Sometimes you have to let that sort of thing go. Why dredge up an glossily commercial 1987 movie anyway? We've got a story here of a person who doesn't want to take care of dogs, who is forced into needing to look after 2 dogs that lack control of their bowels. Adventures in dogshitting.

It's kind of a good comic. My favorite thing about it is that 5 panels after we're told the larger dog is named Kerouac, this happens:

That's also the only panel out of 14 panels where the words bulge beyond the boundary of the square outline.

To really push beyond the square boundary, read "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac.

...they rushed down the street together digging everything in the early way they had which has later now become so much sadder and perceptive.. but then they danced down the street like dingledodies and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.

Yeah, 2 dots after "commonplace thing." 2, not 3. There's nothing in the Comma Queen book about the 2-dot ellipsis (though there is something about the diaeresis (the dots in naïve)).

I guess 3 dots are a normal person's pause, and Kerouac was hot to get on to his burn, burn, burn — bulging beyond the conventions of the square.

"Readers say they were 'shocked' to find a mistake on page 72 of my book, 'Between You and Me.' "

"Shouldn’t 'younger than me' be 'younger than I'?"

Mary Norris defends her position declaring that in her book, "than" works as a preposition." (And, in case you don't watch the video, she does understand the argument that "than" is a conjunction)

I bought the book, "Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen." The passage on page 72 — which she isn't going to change — is:

Nothing makes it clearer how intimately and deeply pronouns are embedded in our lives than having to alter them to refer to someone you’ve known all your life. Just when I was mounting an assault on the Italian language, sorting the nouns that ended in a (mostly feminine) from the nouns that ended in o (mostly masculine), struggling to make sense of the ones that ended in e, the difference between sex and gender leaped out of the textbook and into my real life: my younger brother announced that he was transgender. Dee was two years younger than me, and we had been close— or at least I thought we were close. We grew up together in Cleveland and we both escaped to New York, where we were friends, sometimes neighbors, often confidantes, collaborators, drinking buddies....

"Women seem to use [the dash] a lot … . as if it were a woman’s prerogative to stop short without explanation..."

"... to leave things open-ended. A friend of mine once swept aside all rules governing punctuation by saying 'Whenever you feel a pause, you put in a dash.'"

She provides a strong—and moving—example with the note from Jacqueline Kennedy to Richard Nixon, responding to his letter of condolence after President Kennedy’s assassination. The note is punctuated entirely by dashes, and Norris shows what it would be like if punctuated by a copy editor: “The conventionally punctuated version gives the prose the appearance of being tightly under control, buttons buttoned, snaps snapped, and jaw clamped shut. Jackie’s dashes are spontaneous and expressive, full of style and personality.”

She = Mary Norris, author of "Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen."

ADDED: The 2 versions of Jackie's letter don't appear at the link, but I found Jackie's letter (and you'll have to picture it with periods and commas_:

Dear Mr. Vice President –

I do thank you for your most thoughtful letter –

You two young men – colleagues in Congress – adversaries in 1960 – and now look what has happened – Whoever thought such a hideous thing could happen in this country –

I know how you must feel – so long on the path – so closely missing the greatest prize – and now for you, all the question comes up again – and you must commit all you and your family’s hopes and efforts again – Just one thing I would say to you –if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long – please be consoled by what you already have – your life and your family –

We never value life enough when we have it – and I would not have had Jack live his life any other way – thought I know his death could have been prevented, and I will never cease to torture myself with that –

But if you do not win – please think of all that you have – With my appreciation – and my regards to your family.  I hope your daughters love Chapin School as much as I did –

Sincerely
Jacqueline Kennedy