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One little new book of rhyme is so like another, and almost all are of so little interest! The rare book that differs from the rest has a bizarrerie with its originality, and in the poems of 1830 there was, assuredly, more than enough of the bizarre. There were no hyphens in the double epithets, and words like "tendriltwine" seemed provokingly affected.
So he resorts to the dictionary for help, but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed. They are compound words with the hyphens left out.
In this essay Carlyle introduced to the English people a great German, but a grotesque, whose writings will probably never be read much out of Germany, excellent as they are, on account of the "jarring combination of parentheses, dashes, hyphens, figures without limit, one tissue of metaphors and similes, interlaced with epigrammatic bursts and sardonic turns, a heterogeneous, unparalleled imbroglio of perplexity and extravagance."
I've known birds, says I, 'to be served on toast for less than that. Miss Willella, says I, 'don't ever want any nest made out of sheep's wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian branch of ornithology. Now, are you going to quit, or do you wish for to gallop up against this Dead-Moral-Certainty attachment to my name, which is good for two hyphens and at least one set of funeral obsequies?
Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down for all time, hundreds of years before.
But in our newspapers the compounding-disease lingers a little to the present day, but with the hyphens left out, in the German fashion. This is the shape it takes: instead of saying "Mr. Simmons, clerk of the county and district courts, was in town yesterday," the new form puts it thus: "Clerk of the County and District Courts Simmons was in town yesterday."
'Life-vision' is another example; and many more might be found. To say nothing of the innumerable cases in which the words are only intelligible as a compound term, though not distinguished by hyphens.
Periods were placed in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens; capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word "Psalm" in the title was spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled "Psalme."
The name "Newfoundland" lends itself to this view; for in the letters-patent of 1498 the expression "Londe and iles of late founde," and the wording of the award recorded in the King's privy-purse accounts, August 10, 1497, "To hym that founde the new ile £I0," seem naturally to suggest the island of Newfoundland of our day; and this impression is strengthened by reading the old authors, who spell it, as Richard Whitbourne in 1588, "New-found-land," in three words with connecting hyphens, and often with the definite article, "The Newe-found-land."
She slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat! Poor child! he slumped to the floor, twisted his silken limbs in one great straining contortion of pain, and was dead. Out of the old king was wrung an involuntary "O-h!" of compassion. The look he got, made him cut it suddenly short and not put any more hyphens in it.
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