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The spine of Meet Mr. Hyphen

Review: “Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)”

James GallagherMarch 5, 2022 Review 3s comments
In a post from Merriam-Webster’s Words at Play, Mary Norris (Between You & Me) called Meet Mr. Hyphen the “best thing ever written about hyphens.” First: All hail the Comma Queen! Second: If Norris’s assessment intrigues you, then you’re probably a copy editor.  I read that post years ago, and because the book was out of [...]
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Hyphens, Hauntings, and the Architecture of Sentences

James GallagherJune 13, 2017 Editing, Editing & Writing Tips No Comments

I’d never heard the term hyphen refer to part of a structure, but of course it made complete sense. The hyphens I work with are connectors as well, connecting syllables and words, prefixes and suffixes to roots, fragments ripped unceremoniously apart by end-of-line breaks.

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Bring Out Your Dead!

kimAugust 4, 2013 Editing, Uncategorized No Comments

While reading Mary Roach’s fascinating and surprisingly humorous Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, I came across this sentence: “A series of modern-day Burke-and-Hare–type killings took place barely ten years ago, in Barranquilla, Colombia.” In the 1820s, William Burke and William Hare became notorious for selling corpses to Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox, who eagerly […]

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