In line somewhat with my post on “Zen and the Art of Copyediting,” I thought I’d talk a bit about the process of compounding and how I handle it during copyediting.
First, the rule: Fiction copyeditors are instructed to follow Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition (Web11, as we call it in the industry), with regard to compounds. If Web11 says a word we use all the time and pronounce as one word should be two words instead, we are technically supposed to set it that way. If we don’t (and I often don’t, for reasons I’ll go into below), we note on the style sheet the spelling we used so that we can maintain consistency. (I usually put stet marks under these instances, as well, so that the proofreader doesn’t “correct” them.)
Compounds in English usually begin as two separate words, sometimes progress through a middle phase where they are conjoined with a hyphen, and often reach their ultimate form as a single word. Readers read single words as pronounced differently than separate ones. (Compare “a greenhouse” to “a green house” to see what I mean–the stress falls on the first word in compounds.) Dictionaries supposedly take the commonality and pronunciation of a compound into consideration when determining whether the term should be one word or two. In practice, this is simply not true. I’ve never met a copyeditor who pronounced “copy editor” as two separate words, yet Web11 insists the term should be separate. (I prefer it as one word, and this is my journal, so I’m welcome to set it as such. :-)) A more common example can be found in the compound “restroom.” Even Web10, which was in use just a few years ago, still maintained that the compound should be spelled “rest room,” which was simply ridiculous–it is not a room in which one goes to rest, and no one says it that way. I left it as one word if the author had it that way, and Web11 has finally caught up with me.
At this point I should note that my graduate degree is in linguistics (specializing in sociolinguistics), and partly because of that I am very much a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist.* (This is evident to anyone who follows my journal, but it’s worth mentioning anyway.) I know for a fact that every language changes, that the change is inevitable, and that no attempt to force a language into stasis will last. I embrace linguistic change, because it reflects our society.
And fiction, of course, should reflect the society it is portraying.
Compounding plays into this, in my opinion, more overtly than one might believe. By forcing compounds into their current dictionary forms, a copyeditor (or the production editor requesting the change) is forcing the language to reflect our current society. In science fiction and fantasy and historical romance and many other genres I might edit, that is simply not in the best interests of the book.
In a medieval setting, for instance, different types of swords might be so important that the reader may be able to accept their commonality more clearly through a clear indication of pronunciation. You would have broadswords and longswords rather than broad swords and long swords. In a novel set aboard a spaceship you would have an airlock rather than an air lock. (I actually believe we have airlocks now–another item on which I disagree with Web11.) In fantasy worlds, authors compound any number of terms to reflect the world they’ve created, and those compounds should be allowed to do that.
Again, as in my “Zen” post, what it all comes down to is respect for the work in question. Authors know the pronunciation they intend when they compound a term. They may not be consistent in their selection, in which case I have to choose the option I feel best suits their novel, but in making that selection, I look to the society the author is portraying rather than to the dictionary.
*This is not to say that I am unaware of prescriptivist rules or think them useless. I got my start in publishing, fifteen years ago, by editing college textbooks, and strict adherence to grammatical conventions is necessary for that audience. I know the rules of grammar backward, forward, and upside down; I simply believe that copyediting in fiction is more often a matter of knowing which rules to break than a matter of applying said rules with rigidity.
48 Responses to “Compounding Problems”
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I became the first and only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award.
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Another great post on copy editing. If there’s ever a need for a book on this skill, you ought to be the one to write it. Thanks for posting these.
Joinywords!
Er, seriously, good post, dude. It’s nice to know there are copyeditors out there who will think about these things, rather than rigidly following the rules. :D
This is exactly what I think is so interesting about language. Rather than just use it blindly, I try to look at it as a tool and see how I can use it to get my ideas to the reader more clearly. It’s why one of my pet peeves is people who insist the passive voice should never be used in academic writing. It’s in language for a reason, and sometimes it gives you the emphasis you need.
Well, we say “airlock” when talking about the International Space Station, and you know what lingustic Nazis that aerospace engineers can be…
Another brilliant post, Deanna. Bravo!
This was such an excellent post (I was referred here by ) that I added you to my flist. Don’t feel compelled to friend me back, because I rarely have anything of merit to say about writing. I do, however, like reading people who do.
My stars, I hadn’t thought about the pronunciation shift associated with compound words. What an excellent indicator!
In the early 1880s the word “cow-boy” entered the language. (It was a big dis to call a drover a cow-boy; it meant you considered him a troublemaker, a scofflaw, and probably a rustler.) It was always written with the hyphen in the newspapers of the time. As the hyphen melted away and the component words stuck together, it turned into a neutral job description. Now, in some circles, it’s a positive compliment.
Thanks again for posts like this one. I’m adding it to my “memorable posts” — I think I’ll rename the category to “The Deanna Hoak School of Copyediting.” ;^P Seriously, I really appreciate them, because I haven’t had much formal training, but the work you do sounds exactly like something I’d love to “graduate” to.
Your comment about stetting compounded/uncompounded words got me to thinking. Myself, as a proofreader, I tend to query more than I correct. In what training I have had, I’ve always been admonished to only correct egregious errors — maybe part of the problem with some proofreaders is understanding exactly what is egregious? And although I haven’t had much formal training, one of the things I’ve learned from my first big client was to respect the author’s style. I also know that I’m usually the last pair of eyes to look at the manuscript, so I tend to assume that the editor and/or copy editor has already made decisions like these. If something really goes against my instincts (and I can find support for those instincts in MW or CMS), I still tend to query more often than correcting. The hardest thing for me has been (still is) learning to trust my instincts. ChiaPet always tells me that I sell myself too short, but when it comes to something like this I’ve really feared going with my instincts because I dont have a lot of formal training and I haven’t even finished college. I can usually find support in MW or CMS though, and I was pleasantly surprised when I read through much of CMS and found that most of my instincts agree with CMS’s guidelines!
I’d definitely buy it!
Sometime I go with this, but since I don’t actually “hear” any difference in the pronunciation of rest room and restroom. So teacup and tea ball, what have they (at M-W), my ear don’t skip wrong across either, and I’ve often found writers’ ears get hysterically twitchy. Likewise “hear” no difference or break in half brother or ice cream. I’ve applied the current overriding style when the twitchiness has seemed more jumpiness than thoughful and measured, if that makes sense.
no type on no sleep. bad.
This is what I ask myself a lot of the time: is it a spondee? If the answer is yes, I think of it as two words. If it’s a trochee or iamb, I think of it as one. (Which is why, on that question so hotly debated in copyediting circles, I come down firmly on the side of “blowjob” as one word, contra a number of authorities.) But these things vary from person to person: I know a number of people in NYC who pronounce “Broadway,” which I think of as very much an iamb, as if it were “Broad Way.” And who am I to tell them they’re wrong?
I follow the same policy you do: if it’s a common compound such as “briefcase” that’s pretty much seen as one word all the time (though Erle Stanley Gardner always wrote it as two0, I make it one word. But if it’s something that I consider as in a state of flux, and the author seems to like it one way, I’ll leave it. I generally find myself making things compound or leaving them thus than I do separating them. Especially with tech words such as “airlock.”
You’ve also sidestepped the question of unit modifiers…but I don’t have the energy for that right now…
Oh yeah: for anyone reading this who doesn’t already know: spondee, trochee, and iamb are handy Greek rhetorical terms for a word or two of two syllables. Iamb = accent on 2nd: repeal. Trochee = accent on 1st: Melvin. Spondee = both accented equally: green tree.
Ooh! Blowjob! That’s another good one to disagree with Web11 on! I definitely see that as one word. It’s a BLOWjob. Not a blow job. The latter sounds not nearly as interesting. :-)
So what happens with this rule when you have a compound of more than two syllables? If the first part of the term is multisyllabic, for instance? That’s why I go with the stress being placed in the first word. But it sounds as though we’re in agreement.
Unit modifiers…another good idea for a post. I’ll add it to the list. :-)
Gasp–sanity in copyediting! I had no idea! :-)
(But I have little firsthand experience with copyeditors, and I spend too much time reading Language Log, which is full of copyediting horror stories and consequent copyeditor contempt. Those are academic copyeditors, though. Completely different species than fiction copyeditors.)
I’m also mildly fascinated to see that “Web11″ is the copyeditor’s term for the dictionary that the National Puzzlers’ League calls “11C”, and which the folks at MW, I believe, call “C11″. Even jargon is subject to dialect.
I waver on things like “blowjob” vs. “blow job”–my intuition is to spell “hand job” as two words (the web, statistically, seems to agree; Wikipedia disagrees; Merriam Webster has no comment). The Web11 entry that caught me off guard recently was “comb-over”, which I had thought was a single, unhyphenated word.
Love your blog, but find it painful to read due to the small font and white-on-periwinkle color scheme. Has anyone else mentioned this, or am I the only one? :) I have discovered that if I click to post a comment, it brings up a very readable version of standard black on white, which helps.
Hmm!
I guess I group blow job, hand job, rim job, snow job, day job, hatchet job, etc. alike.
Yes, but Blowjob is a trochee. Hand job is still a spondee. If I’ve heard it accent one syllable, it’s ‘job’, not hand.
The pronunciation of “Broadway,” I suspect, is greatly affected by the songs that mention it. Rather like Route 66.
I’ll second that.
Thanks for letting me know. This is just one of the standard setups that comes with LJ. I haven’t played around with the design much at all (to say that I’m not terribly gifted in design would be overkind of me ;-)), so I’ll do so when I get a chance.
It takes a lot of time to learn to trust your instincts, and you’re right that the style’s more set by the time you’re proofreading. I’ve been in those shoes before, so I try to take pains to let the proofreader know when I’ve made intentional decisions that go against CMS.
Hm. Well, perhaps you have a dialectal variation that doesn’t alter the stress; clearly there is a stress difference for a majority, though, or there would be scant reason for M-W to alter the spelling. (I pronounce “tea ball” as a spondee and “teacup” as a trochee.)
When you say that you apply the “current overriding style,” though, do you mean the spelling that the author used most often, or do you mean the version the dictionary offers? I think many copyeditors get “twitchy” about compounds that aren’t shown as one word in Web11, and they tend to alter to compounds to fit Web11 regardless of what is best for the text.
Deciding what’s best for the book can go against Web11 the other way, too. In Mike and Kathy Gears’ Native North American series, members of the ancient tribes often use cups for their tea. I emphatically do not set “teacup” for those books, keeping the words separate (as the authors prefer, too), because “teacup” implies something more than the horn or wood vessel the characters may be using.
I guess my problem with trying to decide if an author’s “twitchiness” is “thoughtful and measured” is that any speech that is thoughtful and measured is more likely to be less natural. Some authors have a voice and a style that lends itself to that, but many don’t. In fiction, too, where the naturalness of dialogue lends itself to immersion in the world, anything that helps readers more easily “hear” the intonation, stress, and lyricality of the speech in question can deepen the character in their mind, and I really believe it is important to preserve that.
Yeah, I think it is extremely useful to learn the rules, because you can’t really decide how to break them properly if you don’t understand what they’re there to accomplish in the first place. :-) It’s when people decide that the rules of language can never be broken that you get into trouble.
:-) Yeah, it was in working on a rocket scientist’s book that I finally realized that I could indeed go with my best judgment in leaving “airlock” as one word.
I’m very glad you found the post useful. It’s always nice for authors (and editors and agents and anyone else in the field) to be able to have an idea what goes on in the copyeditor’s head.
:-) I love looking at language that way. The differences in dialects and registers absolutely fascinate me.
I suspect that “comb-over” will stay hyphenated because it’s difficult to read if completely combined: We’re used to seeing “combo” and pronouncing it, well, as “combo.” :-)
“Hand job” is a spondee for me, too.
And , thank you for posting those wonderful terms! I knew them somewhere in the back of my head, but I’d forgotten them. How useful they’re being for this discussion!
The differences in dialects and registers absolutely fascinates me.
No doubt that comes from a background in linguistics eh?
Now, slightly OT, but I’d like love to hear your experience with copy editing writers with first language backgrounds other than American English; or even dealing with writers that are polyglots … or hell, writers that have moved around a lot and could be considered polydialectual even. For example have you found that an author whose primary language is romantic based tends to use certain phraseology or sentence structure that is not standard Am. Eng. but lends itself to his/her voice therefore: should be left alone? etc..
I ponder…
-=Jeff=-
I often find compounds in Web. 3rd Unabr. that are not in Web. 11. (Maybe spiderweb used to be one of these, back when we were in M-W 10th days?)
What I mean by the overriding style is that I hardly EVER find authors consistent about any of this anyway. They have teacup and tea cup AND tea-cup all over the place. And semi-circle but semicircular, and so forth. It has been the rarest of the rare who have used any of these compounds with any sort of intention, in my experience. So, as the publisher does have an intention, that being their house’s style, that is my fallback. Like with joining words of more than two syllables with like, but hyphenating for three syllables and up. Yet authors will write doglike and also cat-like—you know, there are a million things like that.
In the one-in-a-hundred occasion I find an author applies some thoughtful consistency—using archaic forms, or simply vocabulary constructions that he or she feels are not overly sophisticated for the setting, as your “tea cup”—I follow the sense and thought with which it was designed.
But I far less often find anything like design on this small-picture scale, on the word or syllable level. Though the flight and fancy and intention clearly pick up on the phrase and sentence, then paragraph level.
Maybe this is my California talking, but all the “job” words I can think of stress the modifier when I say them. From blow job to hand job to snow job.
Sorry. Joining words of up to two syllables with like. Hyphenate three and up. (With those exceptions we know about.)
Ah, I know one. Barstool is in M-W 3rd Unabr. but not in M-W 11th. I’ll check both to back up the author’s usage.
You’re discussing hyphenation more than compounding, though, and those are different topics. Hyphenation is more a matter of clarity and readability, while compounding is a matter of pronunciation and meaning. Authors are more inconsistent on hyphenation, but on compounding they tend to have a pronunciation in their heads that they’re going with. The “intent” may then be subconscious, but it is still there.
Particularly in SF/F, where it’s so common to create compounds, I’ve found that authors are really pretty consistent in their compounding.
I used to look for patterns, but gave up.
field hand
milk shake
egg roll
tea gown
But then I remember getting quite snarled into the eye dialect issue through a few books, and coming around to the thinking that pronunciation of any collection of words and sounds varies so much, even among various characters themselves, that I no longer believe spelling and stress or pronunciation have much to do with each other in practice. So, I stopped trying to spell things based on any judgment of how they are said, as the correlation is so thin anyway.
You can see I’ve been often frustrated.
In a perfect transcription, some characters would say “airlock,” yet another would say “air lock” and a third would have in mind and say “air-lock.” And maybe as they got sophisticated into a new environment, and used to using that word, their own speech pattern would shift into a new casualness with “airlock.” Occasionally, I’ve thought, Such-and-so is talking too familiarly, and a more natural rendition would be to show foreignness, therefore, stage-coach, until they got accustomed, and then another style shift.
Not a rendition that I think as an author or editor would be very welcome or sensical of me—meaning, I’d have to actually have some remarks within the work, or clear self-consciousness. just to get the reader acceptance or permission to proceed without the impression that I was just fucking around and dicking up the prose.
FUN STUFF!
Ah. You’ve had better luck. I tend to have three variations of compounding per novel.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it…and Web. 11 has bj as 2 words. but I think of it as…somehow different…I would put the next three as maybe one word, maybe two.
but language is constantly in flux–another question I ask myself often is Where is this going? I think soon you’ll see these routinely as one word. Maybe it’s the underlying Germanness of English reasserting itself. (“The French have a word for everything. The Germans don’t, but they take two words and put them together, and then they do.”)
Well, with eye dialect, you really do have to assume that the author knows the dialect in question better than you do, and that the pronunciation as written is accurate. You’ll drive yourself insane otherwise, because it’s true that the same word can be said multiple ways, even by the same speaker. A copyeditor who tries to ensure that every instance of a word in eye dialect is spelled the same is making a mistake.
Compounding in English most definitely does affect pronunciation. I love the following quote in the last link, because it’s so germane to what I’m discussing here: “Spelling is often altered in situations like these because readers do not have the benefit of intonation to help their understanding of a sentence, but linguists are much more interested in how the language is spoken, not how it is written.”
Since I’m a linguist who copyedits, I’m interested in both. :-)
Dictionaries keep the words separate for a variety of reasons, though: readability, commonality, and where the word is going. (The dictionaries tend to lag behind on the latter, is all.) In the examples you gave, “egg roll” will undoubtedly become one word eventually, and should probably be one now; “field hand” is a bit difficult to read as one word, or would be treated the same as “cowhand”; “milk shake” is going through a shortening process whereby the “milk” is being dropped and the meaning maintained; and “tea gown” is just not common.
If a compound appears as two words and is not in common use in the reader’s culture, the reader can’t know whether the term warrants the compound stress. By making a term one word, the author is imbuing it with a sense of familiarity for readers, telling them, essentially, that it’s ubiquitous.
Note that I am not at all saying that every compound an author writes justifies going against the dictionary, or that I simply leave all compounds the way the author has them; it is always a judgment call. I take into account authorial preference, pronunciation, the dictionary spelling, and commonality of the word in question to the culture being represented before I make that call.
Hi Deanna! Long time no see!
I just stumbled across your blog, and have been enjoying it immensely.
Just wanted to say that I especially enjoy reading your posts on copyediting, as it has always been one of those mysterious things that we in marketing & publicity wondered about but knew we were never capable of doing ourselves.
Love the new look of the blog, by the way. Much easier on the eyes!
Hi, Colleen! Yeah, I need to make it up to NYC again. An agent friend of mine told me about a class being offered in February that I’d like to take, so maybe I’ll see you then. :-)
I’m glad you’re enjoying the site and the new layout. I spent a ridiculous amount of time yesterday playing with styles and am hoping that this one works pretty well.
With the linguist angle, I wonder if you’d credit this:
Could it be that growing up in So. Cal. and among a majority of Spanish speakers (and the way Spanish there has seeped in to non-Sp. speaking, and local radio, TV), makes hot DOG sounds equally as natural to me (and many of those I went to school with) as HOT dog? For these and nearly every compound, when hearing speech, I’ve always just shrugged and figured, Ah, someone else who says it like/unlike me! (Hence earlier musing on differing compounds depending on individual characters, and how likely that was to fly.)
(I know you’re careful about compounds—who else would go on about the cute little things? I just like to get into these peculiarities and wherefores. Thanks for the discussion!)
Yes, in Spanish compounds, stress falls on the second of the base words, opposite of what we do in English. :-) I had never thought of how that might affect pronunciation in dialects heavily influenced by Spanish. How fascinating!
And I didn’t at all think that you thought I wasn’t careful; I was just clarifying my position in general, lest it appear I was saying I went with anything the author had.
Is this better? It’s not too plain with the lack of color?
With Hollywood and TV-country as our platform, we will take over your language.
; )
It’s elegant, IMHO. And I love the letters in the title background. If I used LJ more for my own posts, I’d steal this design.
Oh, good. I’m glad it works. :-) Thanks for alerting me to the problem.
I realized I pronounce a different stress on sex words, more in line with your note on English compounds. Maybe because it wasn’t a family-round-the-house topic.
Gosh, I didn’t expect such a quick response. :) The color scheme is much easier on the eyes, but font is a bit diffiult, still; all the letters are so close they appear to stick together, particularly the long straight ones. Do they give you choices on font?
Anyway, you have such an interesting blog that I’ll read it no matter what.
Beth