Why is well-educated hyphenated usually, but well informed isn’t? I’m just starting the new Pinker book and I can’t seem to discover an explanation in there. Any ideas? xo, C.
I have no answer but I am curious to know why you would have expected to find one inb Pinker’s book.
-Kris
There is no absolute rule (is there ever?) but if that’s true, perhaps it’s because “well-educated” more commonly occurs as a compound modifier in the attributive position, while “well informed” tends to occur in the predicate position.
He is a well-educated fellow.
George Bush is not always well informed.
From my favorite online guide:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/p.html#predicate
***Predicate. **
A declarative sentence (or independent clause) is made up of two bits, the subject and the predicate. The subject — usually containing one or more nouns or pronouns, along with their accompanying modifiers — is who or what does the action of the sentence. The predicate is what’s said about the subject: it consists of the main verb, along with all its modifiers and objects.
(That simplifies things quite a bit. The subject doesn’t have to be a noun or a pronoun; it can be a that clause, for instance: “That William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him is beyond doubt.” The subject isn’t “William Shakespeare,” but the whole that clause. And some sentences have only “dummy” noun phrases, like “It’s raining,” where the it means nothing.)
Why should you care? In some style guides, some compound modifiers — especially when adverbs that don’t end in -ly modify adjectives — are hyphenated when they appear in the “attributive” position, but not in the “predicate” position. In other words, there’s no hyphen if the adjective phrase is what is being predicated. That usually means they should be hyphenated when they come before the noun they modify, but not after, although that’s not always the case. For example:
Shakespeare’s least-read play is probably Two Gentlemen of Verona. (The phrase is hyphenated because it’s attributive.)
Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, Two Gentlemen of Verona is probably the least read. (No hyphen because it’s in the predicate position.)
He gives a series of well-chosen examples. (Attributive, and therefore hyphenated.)
His examples are always well chosen. (No hyphen.)
It’s a subtle distinction, and not one to get too worked up about. Some style guides are backing away from this rule, preferring to give the general advice that such phrases should be hyphenated whenever they aid clarity. *
While one hesitates to argue with the Chief Pedant on a pedantic matter, I believe in this case he is haring off in the wrong direction.
When a phrase (multiple independent words) is moved to a position where the full phrase functions as a pre-nominal modifier, the fact that it is a phrase taken as a unit is preserved by hyphenating the words together. In the famous apocryphal headline “Police Help Dog Bite Victim,” the ambiguity should have been removed by treating “dog bite” as a phrase and hyphenating it: a dog-bite victim is someone who is the victim of a dog bite.
“Dr. Smith is well educated. He is a well-educated man.”
“Mr. Brown makes a living drilling wells. His well-drilling business is worth millions.”
“Santa’s suit is red trimmed in white fur. His white-fur-trimmed suit is almost as important as his weight in recognizing him.” (Notice that omitting the hyphens here would claim that he has a white suit with fur trim.)
Excellent! Thank you. This does clear things up. In the first example, the “word” least-read is essentially an adjective describing the play, attributing something to it. In the seconod example, “least” modifies “read,” but read functions as the predicate there. I know that in the first example, least- also modifies read, but it’s the hyphenated word as a concept that distinguishes it from the second use.
I’d expect to find something about this in Pinker because he talks about the puzzle of how we learn very subtle distinctions in the language as children, particularly distinctions between words that should work the same as others, but for some reasons, don’t. Some words and ideas seem synonymous, but don’t actually work as if they are. He’s puzzled by that, and it seemed to be a parallel in some ways to my question. How could two very similar words, be treated differently? Now I see. It has to do with how we conceptualize their meanings, which is what Pinker is all about. xo, C.
Thanks. I agree with your point although I’m not clear how it’s at odds with mine.
And for my part, I certainly would not take issue with anyone who whose Chief Arbiter is not pedantry but clarity. (Notice the last line of my quote from Lynch’s style guide.)
Avoiding ambiguity is certainly the reason that the issue of hyphenating a compound modifier comes up in the first place.
In the interest of promoting simplicity and consistency as the next greatest good(s) after clarity, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable approach to hyphenate such compound modifiers regardless of position and let Dopers always be well-informed.
It would be preferable to say that “read” is not the predicate itself, but the modifying words “least read” are in the predicate position–they are the adjective phrase that is being predicated within the whole predicate, which is the main verb along with all of the modifiers and objects.
Yes, that’s more precise and accurate. TY
Based on work with Distributed Proofreaders, where we are frequently working with old books, it seems to be a progression over time from 2 separate words to 2 hyphenated words to a single, joined word.
As they are used together as a phrase more and more over time, people get used to seeing them together and begin to treat them as a unit. So they tend to move toward the joined form. But this happens at a different rate with different word pairs, and sometimes the language seems to freeze in between.
For example, over time ‘to morrow’ becomes ‘to-morrow’ becomes ‘tomorrow’. That one changed so long ago that most people have only seen it in the joined form.
For a more recent example, ‘on line’ becomes ‘on-line’ becomes ‘online’. That one is still happening; my spell checker wants the hyphenated form and objects to the joined word. That will probably change in the future, as the joined version is used more often.
This is an example of how languages are living things, and change at the control of the people who speak them.
Just remember that since the English writing system isn’t phonetic, there are bound to be cases where written text doesn’t accurately correspond to the spoken equivalent and vice-versa. Sometimes punctuation, spacing and the like can show evidence of interesting changes, like the “to morrow > tomorrow” example, but forgetting to distinguish written language (which often follows social conventions that have no basis in the grammar) from spoken language can lead to some funny conclusions. 