You should read the knowing and the known

Hi Lori,

Yes, double-vowel ones in general can easily appear unclear and I think it’s a lot of people’s instincts to keep the hyphen, so only with really popular use do I think we see the hyphen disappear there (hence there are still plenty co-o… and re-e… examples we would not combine!).

Phil

Reading Andrews comment about no co-joined “upto”, I immediately had “upturn” pop into my mind, which we do use.
I dislike the joining of words where two “o”s meet without using a hyphen as they feel to me that they ought then be pronounced “oo” if they are not to mess up our English language spelling and pronunciation even more than it now is. A common example is cooperation instead of co-operation.

Hi Paul,

I appreciate that it’s a pretty picky point, and you’re right there’s no real discernible difference in the way we say or understand either form, but the piece (and title) was aimed at how it’s written rather than spoken. Essentially in its the interests of how we look at enforcing rules in editing. What I wanted I get at it with it overall is that this is an area where people may have a definite opinion or style and consider the other option to be incorrect, and I wanted to explore how both can actually be justified with quite different reasoning, but we come out with the same result.

Hope that makes sense! That and it just seemed interesting to me!

Phil

PS I too cringe when I hear “I could care less”. Thankfully I’m old enough to not want to accept it!

Hi Andrew,

Indeed, you’re absolutely right – it is curious how some words get combined and others do, though yes it all comes down to popular usage. Some things get adopted more commonly than others, and part of it might just be often often they’re used, as you suggest with “up to”, though I suppose there are other factors involved such as how the words sound (into and onto, for example, have a softer consonant with ‘n’ whereas the ‘p’ of up to more naturally keeps the words separate – just speculating there!). There’s no real telling though, and indeed perhaps if you lead the way eventually upto will become accepted as well!

And you’re not wrong about that last point. “could care less” is one of my own personal bugbears; studying language across the world I try to avoid judging any particular uses but that one has held out longer than most in my ire! But I’ve slowly come to accept it; these things certainly aren’t going to go away because people don’t like them!

There seems to be a lack of logic in when we can combine such words. A string of prepositions can be clumsy and disjointed, and yet I do not know when they can be put together as one word. My favourite example of this is “insofar as” – why not unify the whole expression?

I have thought often about words such as “into”, “onto” and “unto”; and why not “upto”? “A number upto N” is logical and sensible, and yet is not the accepted norm. I presume that this is because “up to” used not to be used as frequently as the other expressions and so became stuck outside the family of common conjoined prepositions. (Apparently a conjoined preposition is not a conjunction!). Personally, I have instructed my word processor to accept “upto”, and I live in hope that my efforts will lead to a modification in common usage. After all, it is meant to be evolving language, and if American English can evolve to make “I could care less” mean there is nothing I care less for, then there is hope for for you and I (sic).

PS: I couldn’t refrain from that last comment. I was taught that the best way to eliminate a bad law is to enforce it, but that doesn’t seem to work with laws of language – the badder the better!