{"id":280,"date":"2006-11-11T21:14:14","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T01:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2006\/11\/11\/slow-news-day-hyphens-self-help\/"},"modified":"2006-11-11T21:33:22","modified_gmt":"2006-11-12T01:33:22","slug":"slow-news-day-hyphens-self-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/2006\/11\/11\/slow-news-day-hyphens-self-help\/","title":{"rendered":"slow-news day: hyphens & self-help"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Self-HelpSpeedBump11-11-06\"\u00a0Speed Bump<\/em>, by Dave Coverly, 11-11-06 edition<\/a><\/p>\n

The topic of today’s Speed Bump<\/em><\/a>\u00a0cartoon serendipitously resolved my inner debate over whether to take\u00a0shlep<\/em>\u00a0on a Saturday\u00a0journey into linguisitcs.\u00a0 This little detour began three days ago, when a searcher\u00a0asked Google “is ‘self help’ hyphenated<\/a><\/em>“.\u00a0 There were almost 37,000 results,\u00a0and the first two were links to\u00a0our recent\u00a0shlep<\/em> nomenclature posting<\/a>, which brought the querist to our humble weblog and brought the question to our attention.<\/p>\n

If the searcher found an answer here, it was by example rather than prescription or proscription.\u00a0 Whether\u00a0using\u00a0the term\u00a0as a noun or an adjective, your Editor has always\u00a0employed a hyphen when combining the words “self” and “help”\u00a0in order\u00a0to denote<\/a> “the acquiring of information or the solving of one’s problems . . . without the direct supervision of professionals or experts.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"hyphenKeyN\"\u00a0\u00a0That usage was quickly (and cursorily)\u00a0confirmed, when I checked two other top Google results (one<\/a> from the University of Alabama in Hunstville and the other<\/a> from the California library), which both gave the term “self-help” as examples of the correct usage of hyphens.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Furthermore, my study of German a few decades ago,\u00a0reminded me that the union of “self\/Selbst” and “help\/Hilfe” would\u00a0become the compound word\u00a0“Selbsthilfe<\/a>” in that language, underscoring my belief that “self” and “help” needed to be linked, if the full meaning were to be communicated adequately.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Satisfied that my customary practice\u00a0was correct, I went to bed\u00a0Wednesday night confident that “self help” is in<\/em>correct [as, by analogy, is\u00a0“self represented”].\u00a0 However, that confidence was soon shaken. <\/p>\n

It was with some annoyance, you see, that I kept finding the hyphen-less terms “self represented” and “self representation” in judicial documents<\/a> I was reading for the Thursday posting<\/a> about a pro se<\/em> defendant in Australia.\u00a0 By Friday morning, annoyance had turned to curiosity and obsession, and I was determined to get to the bottom of this hyphen issue — and was\u00a0worried that my Wednesday research had been unfortunately\u00a0incomplete, because limited\u00a0to sources from the USA.<\/p>\n

After much surfing and clicking, I must report that the nations of the British Commonwealth have considerably muddied the “self-help-hyphen” question.\u00a0 Although they are more than willing to add extraneous “u’s” to all sorts of words, they have apparently decided to conserve on ink by the somewhat erratic elimination of the hyphen.\u00a0 More precisely, Australians tend to say “self help” whether the term is being used as an adjective or as a noun.\u00a0 Moreover, they speak of “self representation”\u00a0and “self represented litigants.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"UKmap\"\u00a0The British, on the other hand, appear to\u00a0use a hyphen consistently for the adjectival phrase “self-help” or “self-represented” (see here<\/a> and there<\/a>), while leaving it out when “self help” is a noun (e.g<\/em>., this<\/a> organization). The Scottish appear to say “self representation<\/a>“.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps torn by cross-currents of history and geography, our Canadians friends are not always consistent.\u00a0\u00a0A Canadian\u00a0publishing comany<\/a>, for example, speaks of “self-help books,” but calls itself a “self publishing company,” while using both “self publish” and “self-publish” as verbs, on the same webpage.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One college’s counselling webpage<\/a> utilizes the hyphen-free “self help” terminology as both noun and adjective.\u00a0 However,\u00a0courts in Nova Scotia have a self-represented<\/a> litigants project and self-help<\/a> information guides, while\u00a0British Columbia offers a court Self-Help<\/a> Information Centre.\u00a0\u00a0 Meanwhile, Candians involved in the self-help law movement seem to be studiously avoiding using “self-help” and “self-representation” as nouns.<\/p>\n

Where does this leave us?\u00a0\u00a0 I should have known things might get murky, when I noticed that\u00a0our friends\u00a0at Language Log<\/em> can differ<\/a> on the use of hyphens, and when the Wikipedia<\/a> entry warns us that “A definite collection of hyphen rules does not exist”.\u00a0That discussion goes on to say:\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The use of the hyphen has, in general, been steadily declining, both in popular writing and in scholarly journals. Its use is almost always avoided by those who write for newspapers, for <\/font>advertising<\/font> copy or for labels on packaging, since they are often more concerned with visual cleanliness than semantic clarity; the words are left with spaces. However, it is still used in most (American) newspapers and magazines; hence, people remain accustomed to seeing and understanding its use. In other countries hyphens are dropped in favour of connecting the two-word compounds.”<\/font>\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’m really confused.\u00a0 Besides Germany, just who out there is “connecting the two-word compounds”?\u00a0 For me, “self-help” works fine (following the rule<\/a> that the prefix “self” takes a hyphen), and “selfhelp” beats “self help” for clarity and symbolism.\u00a0\u00a0 When in the USA, I believe correct usage demands the hyphen version of “self-help.”\u00a0 In other English-speaking countries, I suggest always using the hyphen when you’re modifying a noun, and sneaking it in whenever possible on other occasions.\u00a0 (Isn’t there already more than enough space in Australia and Canada, without creating more?\u00a0 And, shouldn’t the British Isles be trying to conserve space, in case those ice caps keep melting?)<\/p>\n

\"hyphenKey\"\u00a0Finally, don’t worry: 1) at court, no judge is going to penalize you for omitting or including a hyphen, when discussing your representation status or the court’s services; if he or she does, please let shlep<\/em> know; and 2) when doing searches on Google or Yahoo, and with virtually all other search engines, “self help” and “self-help”\u00a0will retrieve the same results.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

p.s.<\/em>\u00a0 Now, I’m going to try to salvage a tiny bit of my Saturday, while avoiding the question “why does Dave Coverly say ‘Self-Help’ but not ‘Speed-Bump’?”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Speed Bump, by Dave Coverly, 11-11-06 edition The topic of today’s Speed Bump\u00a0cartoon serendipitously resolved my inner debate over whether to take\u00a0shlep\u00a0on a Saturday\u00a0journey into linguisitcs.\u00a0 This little detour began three days ago, when a searcher\u00a0asked Google “is ‘self help’ hyphenated“.\u00a0 There were almost 37,000 results,\u00a0and the first two were links to\u00a0our recent\u00a0shlep nomenclature posting, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/shlep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}