When Words Divide
A few weeks ago I was emailed a PDF of page proofs for a scholarly paper I’d written. The subject of the paper is a particular dictionary and not surprisingly, the word dictionary (in singular, possessive, or plural) occurs many dozens of times in the paper. Also not surprisingly, it happens regularly that dictionary, in some form, occurs near the end of a line and thus triggers a hyphenation algorithm to determine what part of the word should end the line and what part should begin the next. Here’s something that occurred two or three times in the typeset version of the paper:
Do you see what I find troubling? You don’t if you’re not the kind of pedant I am, but to me it’s just wrong that dictio-nary is hyphenated thus.
I brought this point to the attention of the journal’s editor. She replied that “the idea with this style of hyphenation is that you don’t want the line to end at a morpheme boundary (and, therefore potentially a word boundary), because then people will read ‘diction’ and be stumped by the ‘ary’ on the next line.” She also sent a link to the Merriam-Webster entry of the word, which shows it divided in the way that the page proof hyphenated it:
I respect the editor’s attempt to justify the incorrect (to me) hyphenation, but I don’t buy it. Stumped by ‘ary’? A hyphen at the end of a line informs you that the word is not complete and that for the…
