Monday, January 24, 2005

Hyphenating Like Bunnies

What better for TCI's inaugural post than an inside look at copy editing for skin mags? Via Salon.com—you need to subscribe or click through their lame ad. to read the article, but for those of us whose editorial quandaries are more pedestrian in nature, Is "Doggie Style" Hyphenated? deals with problems that sound both astonishingly familiar and weirder than we usually get:

[Orgies] were the equivalent of sweatshop labor. I had to draw diagrams to keep the positions straight (Peg's on the left, Roger's on his knees, but where'd Yvonne go? Quick, call 911! How'd we lose Yvonne?).
Also, hyphenation, (
"is 'dream cock' hyphenated?") the quirks of "acceptability," (for the Canadian market no anal; in general no fluids in anyone's hair), and the more usual copy-editorial excising of unnecessary commas.

Mind you, the fees were way compensatory. Not many freelance editorial gigs pay $150/hr.





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't I ever get gigs like that?

The answer to the hyphenation questions is simple: only if the words are being used as compound adjectives. For instance: They got splinters in their knees doing doggie-style fucking in the barn.

jennie said...

Yes, if the adjective phrase comes before the noun it modifies; however, if a compound adjective follows a verb, it is generally not hyphenated. So it's "doggie-style copulation," but "copulating doggie style." Also, some styles call for open compounds, unless the compound will be misunderstood if left unhyphenated. I doubt that doggie-style would be ambiguous.