A Handout About Compound Words

A Handout About Compound Words A Handout About Compound Words A Handout About Compound Words By Mark Nichol Recently, this text for an online ad caught my attention: â€Å"All she asked for was a hand-up, not a hand out.† What struck me was that the copywriter, though I give him or her credit for a clever turn of phrase that pivots on the contrast in meaning between two idioms starting with the root word hand, erred not once but twice in treating those compounds: The sentence should have read, â€Å"All she asked for was a hand up, not a handout.† Why? What’s the difference between open, hyphenated, and closed compounds? This compound error illustrates the distinction. Most compound words start out as two words: Someone introduces an idiom- for example, â€Å"We will hand free tickets out† (or, more colloquially, â€Å"We will hand out free tickets†). Then, as the more informal variant of this idiom becomes commonplace, people begin to describe such an action as a hand-out. Over time, the now-ubiquitous compound word is treated as a closed compound: handout. Exceptions exist, however. Some compound words skip the intermediary hyphenation stage, while others never graduate to it; sometimes, the treatment varies for different words with the same second element: For example, the noun makeup evolved from make-up, but mix-up remains hyphenated, though its form may eventually change. However, of the more than one hundred compound words and their variations that begin with hand, none are hyphenated. (Temporary compounds serving as phrasal adjectives, such as in the phrase â€Å"hand-picked successor,† are another matter.) So, why isn’t the compound â€Å"hand up† a hyphenated or closed compound? Well, it’s not a compound; it never evolved to that status (we don’t speak or write about a thing called a handup), and it remains simply a noun followed by a preposition. Handout, on the other hand, is a compound noun, though it remains open when employed as a verb phrase, as in the original example (â€Å"We will hand out free tickets†). But shouldn’t the contrasting terms in the ad copy be parallel? Not at all- after all, this is English, a highly flexible language, we’re talking about. The woman pictured in the ad is asking for a hand up- a figurative boost- not for something handed out. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Style category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:How to Punctuate References to Dates and Times50 Idioms About Meat and Dairy Products3 Types of Essays Are Models for Professional Writing Forms