• spongebue@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Take a second to actually read this one. It’s pretty short and sweet. It’s also from 2007, and talks about nouns (maybe compound nouns) that we really don’t think and probably never knew were hyphenated. It’s not about the use we typically see today.

    As an aside, I’ve noticed people start hyphenating in weird ways, like “I’ve been at this job for 7-years”

    • Pandemanium@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I think at this point MS Word automatically recommends a hyphen after any number + quantifier combo. One time it wanted me to correct “three armed guards” to “three-armed guards” which would have changed the meaning considerably.

      The number of times MS autocorrect suggests incorrect changes to grammar is laughably high, and most people just blindly follow the suggestions.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        I fucking hate autocorrect. I mean to say “its” a lot more often than I mean to say “it’s”, but Gboard on my phone tries to change it to the latter almost every time.

        I say “almost” because it did it the first time in the above sentence, but not the second time, so it managed to make the wrong guess for both of them. Goddamn useless trash – Markov can suck it!

    • ewenak@jlai.lu
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      1 day ago

      Could the strange hyphenation be due to the influence of their mother tongue? I don’t know if there is any language that does it like that, but it seems plausible.