Blogger Purrfection Award

Good Morning Friends!

There have been a lot of awards going around lately; however, my love of cats and the feline in me just had to see a kitty one! Thus I unveil the new CCP "Blogger Purrfection Award."






There are a couple of people I'd especially like to present this to, some because I know they are cat lovers, or in Albert's case, a cat! Then there are others simply because I love spreading HAPPY and you all deserve an award!


Anyone I may have missed who leaves a comment today, please feel free to grab one of these awards for yourself!


Chris - CC Chronicles
Diane - Spunk on a Stick
Mason - Thoughs in Progress
Elizabeth - Mystery Writing is Murder
Albert the Cat - Albert the Cat
Cassandra - Cassandra Jade in the Realm
Alex - Alex J. Cavanaugh
Lorel - I'm Blogging Drowning Here
Elspeth - It's a Mystery
Alyssa - Random Thoughts of a Tangled Mind
Shauna - Read, Write, Review
Karen - karen...following the whispers
Elinor - Mavor Arts
Marvin - The Old Silly's Free Spirit Blog
Michele - Southern City Mysteries
Ingrid - The Conscious Cat


Thanks to all my Purrfect Blogger friends! Please pass this forward to other special people!

Hyphens

THE HYPHEN: A NEVER-WERE-THERE-SO-FEW-SOLID-RULES PUNCTUATION MARK

You can use a hyphen to split a word at the end of a line, but you can also use a hyphen to join compound words.

The rules about when to hyphenate a compound word are extremely vague. The problem is that compound words go through an evolution from open compound (two separate words), to hyphenated compound, to closed compound (one word with the two parts together)—and sometimes back again—and the changes can seem arbitrary. For example, when the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was released in 2007, it eliminated sixteen thousand hyphenated words. Some words (leap-frog) advanced to closed compound form (leapfrog), and other words (pot-belly) reverted back to open compound form (pot belly). The best advice is to consult a dictionary when you aren't sure whether to hyphenate a compound.


In very general terms, you use a hyphen to avoid confusion. For example, when two adjectives modify a noun, sometimes the sentences could be read two ways or be initially confusing to a reader, so you can use a hyphen to clarify which words to together:

Paula wanted a short haired dog.
(Could be read to mean that Paula wanted a short dog with hair.)

Paula wanted a short-haired dog.
(More clearly means that Paula wants a dog with short hair.)


A hyphen also eliminates confusion when it is used to clarify pronunciation:

I need to re-press my jeans.
I need to repress those memories.


Often a hyphen is used between two adjectives that come directly before the noun they modify, but not when they come after the noun they modify:

They are in a long-term relationship.
They are in it for the long term.


Despite the vast wiggle room in hyphen land, there are a few solid rules. You can confidently use a hyphen when you are joining a prefix to a word that must be capitalized, joining a letter to a word, and writing out numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine.

Anti-American
Un-American
Pre-Mesozoic

X-ray
A-list
T-shirt

Thirty-five
Sixty-four
Ninety-three


It's fine to occasionally make up an adjective using a long string of hyphenated words for effect, but don't overdo it to the point that you become an irritating hyphenate-for-no-reason writer.



Sources: Grammar Girl, CMS

Vocabulary

Increase your vocabulary with not-very-common and/or not-frequently-used words.

Today's Weird Word is: FISSIPAROUS, and its pronounciation is: fi-sih-pa-rus.

Fissiparous is an adjective meaning: tending to break up into parts, divisive.

The reorganization of management can have a fissiparous effect on the rest of the company.







Source: Workman's Publishing

Dashes

Last week's post on colons brought up a question from a commenter about colons and dashes. The difference between the two is subtle: they can both serve to introduce a related element after a sentence, but a dash is a stronger and more informal mark than a colon. Think of a colon as part of the sentence that just ambles along. Susan has two favorite colors (and now I'm going to tell you what they are): orange and blue. A colon informs readers that something more is coming.

A dash, on the other hand—well, it's quite a dramatic thing. A dashing young man is certainly not an ordinary young man, and if you're dashing off to the store, you're not just going to the store, you're going in a hurry. A dash interrupts the flow of the sentence and tells the reader to get ready for an important or dramatic statement. If you added a dash to the "Susan" sentence it would conceptually read something like this: Susan has two favorite colors (wait for it; wait for it!)—orange and blue. Wow!

Given that there isn't anything exciting about Susan's favorite colors, a dash may not be the best choice here, but it wouldn't be wrong. It would be a better choice if that sentence were part of a mystery novel where something orange was missing and Susan was implicated as the thief. Then it could be a dramatic announcement that she loves orange, and a dash would make more sense.

A very important rule about dashes is never, never, never use a hyphen in place of a dash. A hyphen is not a junior dash; it has its own completely separate use.

There is no computer key for a dash; you need to insert a dash as a symbol. If for some reason you can't insert the dash symbol, use two hyphens right next to each other: --.

Dashes can also be used like commas or parentheses to set off part of a sentence. When you use dashes to set off a parenthetical element, you're using the strongest method possible to draw attention to it, so be sure it merits the drama.

Different Types of Dashes

There are two different kinds of dashes: em dashes (—) and en dashes (–). An em dash is longer than an en dash.

(The names come from the fact that historically the em dash was as long as the width of a capital typeset letter M, and the en dash was as long as the width of a capital typeset N. Now with computer typesetting, the widths of each may vary from font to font, with the width on an en dash always falling midway between a hyphen and an em dash.)

The em dash is the kind of dash I referred to in this post; it is the kind of dash you use in a sentence. When people say, "Use a dash," they almost always mean the em dash. The en dash is used much less frequently and usually only to indicate a range of inclusive numbers. You would use an en dash to write something like this:

Susan will be on vacation June 2–June 9.
(Susan will be on vacation June 2 to June 9.)

The to and the en dash between the dates indicate that Susan will not be in the office beginning the second of June and will return on the tenth of June (because an en dash indicates that the numbers are inclusive of those two dates).

Whether using an em dash in a sentence or the shorter en dash to indicate an inclusive range, you can use your own judgment about whether to put spaces between the dash and the words around it—it's a style issue, so just be consistent.


Source: Grammar Girl

Thoroughness Challenge

Thorough Thursday is a post consisting of paragraphs that contain spelling and/or grammatical errors. The paragraphs with the errors corrected and highlighted in red can be found at the end of the post.

Note: The purpose of the Challenge is thoroughness. You're only looking for errors in spelling and/or grammar. Names and places will NOT be misspelled, nor will there by any changes to punctuation or sentence structure. In addition, if there is a word that may have more than one accepted spelling, those also will not be changed.


Your Challenge today takes a look at how to pronounce "2010," and contains 6 errors. Good Luck!


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How do you say the current year? Now that we've reached double digits at the end of "2000," I'm sure you have heard people refer to the year differently. The to main contenders are "twenty-ten" and "two thousand ten." So which is correct?

Before the turn of the century, most people pronounced the years by combining the first too numbers and the last too numbers. So we had "nineteen fifty," nineteen eighty-five," and so on. After the turn of the century, we started commonly pronouncing the years the long way; "two thousand one," "two thousand two," and so on.

Now it seems that some people feel more comfortable continuing the trend--going from "two thousand nine" to "two thousand ten" --while the majority of people are eager to return to the old convention, happily moving on from "two thousand nine" to the snappyer sounding "twenty-ten."

The Associated Press has concluded that "twenty-ten" is the preferred choice. However, with all the decisions made when writing (or speaking), the pronounciation question is a style choice; making either pronounciation correct.


Now, let's see how thorough you are!


*******************************************************************************
How do you say the current year? Now that we've reached double digits at the end of "2000," I'm sure you have heard people refer to the year differently. The two main contenders are "twenty-ten" and "two thousand ten." So which is correct?

Before the turn of the century, most people pronounced the years by combining the first two numbers and the last two numbers. So we had "nineteen fifty," nineteen eighty-five," and so on. After the turn of the century, we started commonly pronouncing the years the long way; "two thousand one," "two thousand two," and so on.

Now it seems that some people feel more comfortable continuing the trend--going from "two thousand nine" to "two thousand ten" --while the majority of people are eager to return to the old convention, happily moving on from "two thousand nine" to the snappier sounding "twenty-ten."

The Associated Press has concluded that "twenty-ten" is the preferred choice. However, with all the decisions made when writing (or speaking), the pronunciation question is a style choice; making either pronunciation correct.

Sources: AP Stylebook, Grammar Girl