Dear Bill,
Being someone who uses gerunds not only correctly but elegantly and bothers to hyphenate compound modifiers, you'll appreciate, I hope, my noting that '20 year old' should be '20 year-old' because it is a hyphenated noun. Were ;">we to make his age adjectival by the addition of an extra noun, though, an extra hypen would be required, as in 'the 20-year-old man'.
Best wishes,
Will.
I accept the correction, Will. But there is a residual puzzle. How can '20' modify the noun 'year-old'? There is also the question whether I should have written 'twenty' instead of '20.' This is clearly bad writing: 'He gave me 5 books.' Correct is: 'He gave me five books.' But few will write, 'He gave me five thousand four hundred and seventy seven books' instead of 'He gave me 5,477 books.'
There is no end to punctiliousness once you start down that road. For example, I just used 'you' in a slightly nonstandard way. And as for hyphens, should we follow the Teutonic tendency of letting them fall into desuetude? 'Nonstandard' or 'non-standard'? 'Truth maker' or 'truth-maker' or 'truthmaker'?
Do you say, 'The engine whose plugs are fouled?' or 'The engine the plugs of which are fouled'? I prefer the latter despite its stiltedness. An engine is not a person. And if you don't agree with me on this point, will you say it is acceptable to write, 'The man that was shot' rather than 'The man who was shot'?
'She hanged herself' is correct. But few nowadays are observant of the 'hanged'/'hung' distinction.
But should a writer like me, who aspires to a certain muscular elegance in his style, be using a slightly quaint and archaic, and perhaps even obsolete word such as 'nowadays'?
I distinguish 'each other' from 'one another' and call down my anathema upon those who write like this: 'Due to their almost exclusive association with each other, liberals reinforce their political correctness.'
And so it goes.
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