Restaurant Inspired Meals and Flash-Dry Technology

Here are some interesting (or maybe mundane) examples of proper and improper hyphen usage. There is a missing hyphen in "restaurant-inspired", as it is a compound adjective. Saying "restaurant, inspired meals" would not make any sense. Bad, bad Healthy Choice.




Here is a proper use of hyphens, as "leak-proof", "flash-dry", "quick-dry", and "drip-proof" are all compound adjectives. Good job, Hartz Training Academy.

Before I took this class, I never noticed these things. Thank you, Eng 408 for giving me “grammar vision”. :P

Hangman

"The man hung out under the tree yesterday."
"The man hanged out under the tree yesterday."

The verb “hang” is very interesting in that it has two past tense forms, “hung” and “hanged”. These words are commonly misused and interchanged, though they actually have different applications. The word “hung” is actually the correct past tense form of “hang” in every situation except one, when death is invoked. The correct usage for the word “hanged” is applicable only when someone has cold, dangling feet.

So basically, you don’t ever want to say, “I hanged out under the tree yesterday.”

On another interesting, slightly unrelated note, the same can be said about the words “shocked” and “electrocuted”. The word “electrocuted” implies death.

How Does I Engrish?

While looking for something to post for the week I happened to rediscover the wonders and joys of Engrish.com. The website portrays failures of English that exist in our world and have been perfectly captured and documented in there natural habitats. At the expanse of others, it serves to remind me how difficult our language, and all its nuances, can be, even things that we take for granted, such as, the proper use of commas. Its also hilarious. Grammer is hard!

Editing Within Different Mediums?

Reading the bit about “One Paragraph, Three Ways” was very interesting, as I had never thought about the importance of preserving the author’s style when editing. However I was wondering if copyediting in different mediums call specifically for different degrees of editing "heaviness". For example, it would probably be safe to assume that maintaining authorial style would be very important in a novel, and so a light copyedit would be used to revise the piece. But what about magazines, newspapers, or web pages? Are there any standards that are restrictive of the medium that the editor must work in?