I was reading a fascimile of an old newspaper with the headline
“Amelias 10000 miles’ dash…”
now I would have thought “Amelia’s 10000 miles dash …” looks more natural as it is Amelia’s dash, not the mile’s but I dont really understand the apostrophe very well. Any grammartarians out there?
Miles is actually a possessive there – a three days’ journey is a journey of three days – but Amelia is as well.
The modern preference (at least in publications I have worked on) would be “Amelia’s 10,000-mile dash”.
Which brings me to a peeve. I see this type of construction used wrongly increasingly often, for example “He is six-feet tall” or “The race was 10,000-miles long”. You should hyphenate it only when it’s used prenominally.
My related peeve: hypenation of the verb form.
OK: I have a pick-up at one o’clock at the airport.
Not OK: I have to pick-up the client at one o’clock.
Same with set-up, look-up, etc.
Ugh. And it’s on the increase, thanks to pay-as-you-go mobile phones. Top-up your phone now! :dubious:
I don’t know why this grates so much, but it does…
It is ugly but possibly OK? The hyphens main job seems to me to separate and join confusing constructs which can happen in the verb and well as the noun case. So pay-as-you-go mobile could be confused with pay-as-you go-mobile (though unlikely). Eventually it might contract into one word a “payasugo” mobile. Though “have to pick-up” seems silly. (How about “I have to pick-up my pick-up who has my pick-me-up”
I take the point that miles’ could be possessive - and modern usage would indeed be Amelia’s… It was a very old newspaper (1936), somaybe the rules have changed slightly.
I wasn’t criticising “pay-as-you-go” as an adjective – that is standard and correct, AFAIK.