Brer Ardith Hinton wrote to Brer Roy Witt about Ha-ha again(2):

 AH> Hi, Roy!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

 RW>>   Brer Ardith Hinton wrote to Brer Paul Quinn

 AH>    ^^^^                        ^^^^

 AH>            I see you've changed your spelling of this word, whether
 AH> by accident or by design... so I thought a bit of clarification might
 AH> be in order.

It was by design and from my early days in Fidonet. It is taken from a
West African story about Br'er Rabbit and his friends, Br'er Fox, Br'er
Bear and a Tar Baby, narrated by a black slave named Uncle Remus in a
Disney Classic called "Song Of The South". You can find an illustrated
history of the origins of the story here:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Br%...

 AH>            Essentially it's a dialectical variation & contraction of
 AH> "brother". The apostrophe is used, as it is in other contractions, to
 AH> indicate where there has been an omission of one or more letters:

 AH>                     brother  -->  br[oth]er  -->  br'er

True.

 AH>            Many people do spell it without the apostrophe nowadays
 AH> though.
 AH> :-)

Yeup.

 AH>>>  hyphenated word regarded by the authors of my OXFORD
 AH>>>  CANADIAN DICTIONARY as North American & Australian slang:

 AH>>>  widow-maker.


 AH>            I noticed the same spelling in MERRIAM-WEBSTER ONLINE just
 AH> now, BTW.

Widowmaker is defined as: Widow maker or widowmaker is a somewhat
facetious term used for something that is considered to present a lethal
hazard to, predominantly, men, and thus, by taking their lives, may make
their wives become widows.

in the online dictionary that I use, TheFreeDictionary.com

It has more than a dictionary and thesaurus, it also includes a Medical
Legal and Financial dictionary, including Acronyms, Idioms and an
Encyclopedia...

If you look up widow-maker, you're referred to the origin and history of
Pecos Pete and his horse, Widow-Maker. Which is an interesting piece if
there ever was one.

Pecos Pete's; "His horse, Widow-Maker (also called Lightning), was so
named because no other man could ride him and live."


 RW>>   The reality is that a hyphen between two words (two
 RW>>   adjectives?) modifys the noun that comes after them.


 AH>            Sometimes we use hyphenated words as modifiers regardless
 AH> of whether or not the components are listed in the dictionary as
 AH> adjectives. You've shown us how terms like "widow-maker" and
 AH> "twin-engine" can be used that way.  But we can do it with other
 AH> parts of speech too.  I've seen things like "oft-wed movie actress
 AH> Gloria Glamorpuss" used in Hollywood journalese over the years....
 AH> :-)

8^) I wouldn't know about that, as I don't read such, errr, journals.

 RW>>   OTH, if the same words came after the noun; i.e. The
 RW>>   B-26 Maruader was a WW2 twin-engine medium bomber,
 RW>>   nick-named the widow maker -

 AH>            There's another example of the above... "B-26".

Living across the border from Seattle, you should know that 'B-26' is a
model designator for a bomber airplane made by The Boeing Company during
WW2. The B indicates 'Bomber' and the number 26 is the model number. i.e.
A B-29 dropped Little Boy (Atomic Bomb) over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6,
1945.

 AH> But IMHO a nickname may be a different matter.  Once it has achieved
 AH> the status of a Proper Noun it could conceivably retain the same
 AH> spelling for a long time. If whoever came up with the name used two
 AH> words that's how it's spelled AFAIC.

OK.

 AH>   I've met kids with given names which suggest their parents didn't
 AH> know the standard spellings, and who are stuck with what's recorded
 AH> on their birth certificate until they're old enough to have it
 AH> legally changed.

I would have preferred to grow up using the variation of my middle name,
rather than Roy. Those were confusing times as my father and grandfather
both had the same name that they gave me. My mother, who wanted to
differentiate between us, called me Jackie or Jack, while my dad was
referred to as Junior, leaving my grandfather with the distinction of
using Roy.

 AH> Other folks may have surnames they continue to spell the same way
 AH> their ancestors did four hundred years ago, although they leave out
 AH> half the syllables when they say them aloud.

Some even distort the name to their preference. Bret Favre (Green Bay
Packers) does this by pronouncing the 'r' before the 'v'...I call it as I
see it and pronounce it as favor...i.e. we're not in France.

 AH> How would you pronounce "Worcestershire sauce"?  IIRC you omit two
 AH> syllables, while I omit one.... ;-)

I call it 'Steak Sauce!' because it's a whole lot better than A-1...

 RW>>   Which only goes to prove that you can slip this kind
 RW>>   of stuff into any sentence in any which way that you
 RW>>   please, as most native English speakers won't know
 RW>>   the difference. 8^)

 AH>            Uh-huh.  When I checked the Internet +/- 7,530,000 entries
 AH> appeared. I'm sure you'll forgive me for not reading all of them...
 AH> but in terms of sheer numbers "widowmaker" (one word) seems to come
 AH> out ahead. It's the name e.g. of a weapon, a cocktail lounge, a rock
 AH> band or something of the sort, a movie, and a series of books.
 AH> They're in the first forty entries here & our modem buddies overseas
 AH> may be grateful they see fewer ads for such things!  Apart from that
 AH> I found only one example similar to
 AH> yours:  a doctor describes a specific variety of arterial blockage &
 AH> calls it the widow maker (two words)... a patient writes about his
 AH> widow-maker heart attack.  In general, however, I'm inclined to agree
 AH> with your assessment of the signal-to-noise ratio in the common
 AH> parlance.  :-))

That's a fact too. Some people get stuck in a rut and even when it is
pointed out to them that what they're saying is incorrect, they continue
to 'have it their way'... i.e. your, you're comes to mind.


         R\%/itt - K5RXT

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