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Message: 6678

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 18/08/2010

Subject: Re: "JSW: The 2010 Megamix" room names - briefly

 

This is a combined reply to Messages 6666 and 6677.

jetsetdanny wrote:

>
> "JSW: The 2010 Megamix" is approaching its beta stage. I would be
> glad to sort out all of the room-name-related issues before I
> arrive at the beta version. So I would appreciate it if you could
> briefly comment on the following questions:
>
> 1. If I use "No." instead of "#", should it be e.g.:
> "No.1" or "No. 1"?

I see "No." a lot in tennis-articles. Usually, it's written with the space, but sometimes without (e.g. on the WTA Tour's official website). So it's a matter of style: you have to make a decision and stick to it consistently.

Personally, I strongly prefer "No." without the space, as it looks much more compact, and enables you to combine it with a hyphen, as in "the world's No.1-ranked player" (a hyphen binds tighter than a space, but not as tightly as concatenation).

A policy of omitting the space would also mean that the 32-character limit on room-titles would never force you to be inconsistent.

> 2. "Brick Road to Brick-Hard Rooms" - does it sound / look OK?
>
> 3. "The BBC Wine Cellar Gone Crazy" - does it sound / look OK?
>
> 4. "One Dumb Waiter and Two Daft Lifts" - does it sound / look OK?

They look okay to me (except that the word "Wine" violates my anti-drugs principles). A cellar couldn't literally go crazy, of course, but it's valid as an instance of personification.

> 6. Reluctantly, I have resigned myself to the spelling "Cage-like
> Catwalk" instead of "Cagelike Catwalk". However, if there are
> people who think that "Cagelike" - spelled as one word - would be
> acceptable, please step forward and let your voice be heard.

Generally, if the resulting word is unfamiliar, then it should be hyphenated rather than concatenated. The New Oxford Dictionary of English doesn't have an entry for "cage{-}like", but does have an entry for "-like", with "pealike" and "crust-like" as examples. It's not clear why they chose to be inconsistent.

If in doubt, hyphenate. It is never wrong to do so, and very often, it is absolutely necessary.

> Before asking you for help, I tried to make the names as perfect as
> possible myself, by reading various materials on the Web concerning
> proper spelling rules in English and looking for examples. From
> what I could find, the spelling of compound numbers in titles
> should be like I have done: first digit capitalised,
> the other digit after the hyphen in lower case.
> If you can quote (point to) any rules or convincing examples to the
> contrary, please do so.

George Orwell's novel _Nineteen Eighty-Four_.

> Furthermore, I am hesitating as to whether to use sentence case in
> room names which sound like sentences or capitalise most words.
> I think I will have to make this decision on my own - unless any of
> you have strong views on this point.

Make a decision about which case to use, and stick to it consistently – unless you have to make an exception to respect the rules of a different language.

I didn't stick to a case-convention when I wrote Jet Set Dizzy as a 16-year-old, but today I wonder why I decided to write "Le jardin de l'eau" in sentence-case when I wrote most of the room-titles in title-case. Something must have crept into my subconscious as I studied GCSE French...

> In fact, there are no spaces in the room name between the words and
> the arrows, but I misspelled it when writing my message.

You need SPECSAISIE's RoomsJSW function!

--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://abroad.sqweebs.org/spectrum/software/

 

 

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