Clarion Content

Just a quick follow-up to our post on the University of North Carolina's Davis Library Finals' Week flash mob. How many challenging, modern, compound-or-not words were there in that post?

Flash mob, itself, a compound word, two words or hyphenated? Wikipedia opts for two words in its header, but it can't make up its mind because it then opens its entry with, "A flash mob (or flashmob)..." Merriam-Webster also opts for two words. The definitive source for such a modern term, Urban Dictionary (UD), opts for two words, as well.

However, easily flash mob is dispatched by the authorities, the Clarion Content thinks it is not as clear-cut. The idea of a flash mob is a singular concept, not an adjective modifying mob, as would be the case in "large" mob or "wild" mob.

Other problematic words emerged from this same post, handheld, for example. Mozilla Firefox is confident that handheld is not a compound word, brazenly underlining it. But then again, what does Mozilla know? Well for one thing, it knows how to spell Mozilla. Though, not so generous to potential competitors, it underlines Facebook as if it had never heard of the massive network. Facebook is a proper noun, ergo the choice for two words, hyphen or compound word belongs to the owner of the entity that is the name. In this case they have opted for one word, and Mozilla, along with Microsoft Word, Google Docs and their ilk need to accept it.

But back to handheld, once again Wikipedia waffles. "Hand held" re-directs to the article for "Mobile Device" which in its first sentence uses handheld as a single compound word. Searching Wikipedia for "hand-held" hyphenated yields a disambiguation page where handheld is treated as a compound word in four article titles and a hyphenated word in two titles. Mozilla, of course, accepts the hyphenated word "hand-held" because it is made up of two words it accepts and the hyphen is a signifier to treat them separately. Merriam-Webster in this case is definitive opting for the compound word "handheld" and dating it all the way back to 1923. The Clarion Content cannot fail to agree, "handheld" a singular descriptive state, an adjective, one word.

The final to compound or not word that popped up prominently in the Davis Library Flash Mob piece was "chatroom." Of course, Mozilla Firefox, in its stern, unforgiving manner says it is a mispelling. As noted previously, due to a programming default, it is willing to accept to "chat-room." Merriam-Webster agrees with Mozilla's anti-chatroom stance. It dates the phrase "chat room" to 1986 and says two words, no hyphen. It undermines itself to a certain extent because the Google Ad Sense ad on the page shills for a one word "chatroom" site. Wikipedia prefers two words for chatroom although the article opens with the dual warnings, "This article needs additional citations for verification," and "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards."

The Clarion Content is inclined to disagree with the fuddy-duddies at Merriam-Webster and the negatistas Mozilla (who think fuddy-duddy isn't a word and have never heard of negatista). Chatroom is a singular concept, a noun referring to a particular meme, a virtual room where one goes online to have chats. Urban Dictionary has no fewer than eleven definitions of "chatroom" all of which treat it as one word. UD also has seven chatroom related phrases defined from "chatroom thug" to "chatroom whore" all of which treat chatroom as a singular phrase. It is certainly still arguable though, even via modern sources, for example, the website www.techfaq.com offers a more reasonable definition for chatroom than any of those on UD, but treats "chat room" as two words.

Ah, these modern words and phrases bring us much fascinating debate. One of our favorite modern linguists, And He Melts noted that, Philip K. Dick in his 1964 novel, The Unteleported Man, produced in the first thirty pages alone a massive treasury trove of hyphenated words ranging from "the impatient ("syn-cof," instead of "synthetic coffee"), [to] the needless ("break-through"), [to] the redundant ("aud-receptors/aud-monitors/data-monitors/data-recorders"), [to] the quaint ("light-years, ""colony-world"), [to] the way-ahead-of-his-time ("UN-egged-on"), and the simply fantastic ("Swiss-made nipple-assist")." We look forward to more of this kind of linguistic fun, thinking, and discussion about the compound words of this modern era. (Which is not to say there are not fun old compound words still to debate.)

Labels: Language