Sunday, July 13, 2014

Copy editing: "Is blow job hyphenated?"

A recent tweet to the Guardian style guide asked which version was correct: “blowjob, blow-job or blow job?” As it happens, this question was covered 32 years ago by the incomparable Stan Mack, whose Real Life Funnies (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim”) ran in the Village Voice from the 1970s into the ’90s.
















When this strip ran, in 1982, I was a new copy editor at the Boston Globe, where there was no occasion to use “blow job” in any style. If I’d been editing at the Voice, though, I would have voted for open style, which still looks right to me. But as we all know, familiarity breeds hyphen-free compounds. Most books still use blow job, according to Google Ngrams, but I can see that a writer or editor using the term regularly might be ready, after a decade or two, to write it blowjob. And that's what the Guardian (though claiming no expertise) decided on.

And yes, it is in "the dictionary": American Heritage prefers blowjob (but lists the two-word variant), Webster’s New World likes two words (but mentions blowjob), and Merriam-Webster prefers blow job, period. So editorially speaking, it's chacun(e) à son goût.

If you missed Real Life Funnies the first time around, you can see (and buy) some at Mack's website; his current cartoons appear weekly in MediaPost.

4 comments:

mistah charley, ph.d. said...

oneword

Gregory Lee said...

"Blow job" is clearly a single word, a compound made from two words, but that doesn't bear on the issue of whether it should be written with a space, a hyphen, or nothing between the two words that make up the single word compound. Writing the space there doesn't make it two words -- it's still just one word, though there are two words present, of course: the two that make up the compound.

There are other, more interesting instances of the same issue, when parts have to be distinguished from wholes. Here's one: does English allow the subject of a sentence to be a single word? A syntactician would most likely say No. An example like "Larks migrate" has the noun phrase "larks" as subject, not a noun, but this noun phrase is made up of the single word "larks".

Here's a still more interesting case. How many words are in "men and women" in the example phrase "old men and women", interpreted to mean that "old" applies to both "men" and "women"? The right answer, IMO, just one word, which is the noun "men and women". What is modified by an adjective must be a noun.

Who Am Us Anyway? said...

"But as we all know, familiarity breeds hyphen-free compounds." That's it! Exactly right! Email, website, blowjobs ... but still i don't like the look of a w right up next to a j. Call me what you will but i too prefer two words: blow job.

Linda said...

Copy editors are also referred to as sub-editors in the magazine and newspaper industry....!!


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