The Water-Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley
Mar 14, 2017 6:42:27 GMT -5
Post by ahinton on Mar 14, 2017 6:42:27 GMT -5
Mar 14, 2017 1:24:02 GMT -5 @sydgrew said:
The strike of "your" is presumably down to
As to the distasteful and wholly unnecessary reference to "some semi-literate negress", I will refrain from comment other than to say that
(a) skin pigmentation and gender cannot in and of themselves impact upon spelling habits and
(b) whilst I know of only one person who would habitually insert a hyphen between "to" and "day" in "today" nowadays (and might said person insert one in other words such as "to-morrow", "yester-day", "to-night", one might wonder?), it is not for me to say whether the practice of omitting them in such words is or is not to be "recommended", since I am not a professional grammarian or lexicographer and therefore not in the business of making such recommendations. That said, whilst my edition of the usually reliable OED does spell "to-day" with a hyphen, the illustrated examples of the use of the word that follow the entry for it include such spellings as "to dai", "to day", "too day", "to daye" and - yes - "today", which rather confuses the issue (although many of those examples are from a long time ago) and, in any case, public.oed.com/the-oed-today/ might suggest that the current edition has dropped that hyphen. The habit that the aforementioned person has of writing words of more recent origin such as "wire-less", "tele-vision" and "inter-net" with hyphens is perhaps yet more bizarre; my OED has "wireless" and "television" unhyphenated and, although it's too ancient to include "internet" at all, I note (from the internet!) that it currently has this unhyphenated also.