And So Does "Anal-Retentive"

[woodwardiocom]

-Me being incredibly obsessive about such things, allow me to say, just this once:

Spider-Man has a hyphen.

(Many superheroes don't have hyphens. Superman and Catwoman are one word. Iron Man and Wonder Woman are two words. But Spider-Man has a hyphen.)

Comments

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Words cannot express (even hyphenated ones) how much I love that things like this matter to you. :-)

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-See, this is why we're perfect for each other.

[tisana.livejournal.com]

Did you see the Fox Trot cartoon where Jason criticizes Paige for not pronouncing said hyphen? That is, he could tell the difference between "Spider Man" and "Spider-Man."

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-Alas, I missed it. But I always identify with Jason.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually anal-retentive doesn't have a hyphen. It's a "hyphenated" word, but the mark itself is an en-dash.

More Anal-Retentive Than Thou :)

P.S. For the anal-retentive audience, the Chicago Manual of Style is online, with Q&A and a search feature.
http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/search.html

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-Bah, an anonymous drive-by grammar attack!

[anaisdjuna.livejournal.com]

Hee hee!

Funny episode of The Daily show was when John Stewart was advising Spider-Man on his first trip to hollywood. He said he should introduced himself as Spiderman.

[beowabbit]

No, hyphens are shorter than en dashes. En dashes are used where you would otherwise use a hyphen, if one of the components of the hyphenated phrase has a space in it (as "Sino-United States relations", which is a phrase so clumsy you can just imagine Xinhua using it). Also, I think in most fonts en dashes are used for figure dashes ("May 18-21, 1972"; "pages 201-224"), but I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where you might need to distinguish en dashes from figure dashes; certainly Unicode has separate code points for them.

(PS -- Of course, I'm using ASCII minus/hyphen here in the examples. Don't have an easy way to input arbitrary Unicode characters on this particular computer, and don't have a guarantee that your browser can display them.)

[metalfatigue]

Entering them is easy, anyway—you can put HTML entity references in your comments.

฿ξש

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

YES.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

"No, please, don't call me Mr. Spiderman. Mr. Spiderman is my father."

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Or like one of my favorite Friends exchanges:

Phoebe: (to Chandler) Hey! (Chandler looks up, startled) Why isn't it Spiderman [pronouncing it "SPY-der-men"]? Y'know, like Goldman, Silverman...
Chandler: 'Cause it's... it's not his last name.
Phoebe: It isn't?
Chandler: No, it's not like, like, Phil Spiderman. He's a spider, man. Y'know like ah, like Goldman is a last name, but there's no Gold Man.
Phoebe: Oh, okay. -- There should be Gold Man!

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

Hee hee...exactly!

Phil Spiderman! *snerk*

Re:And So Does "Anal-Retentive.

[crazybone.livejournal.com]

Not a colon?:)