{"id":2985,"date":"2008-05-28T15:05:50","date_gmt":"2008-05-28T20:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2985"},"modified":"2008-05-28T15:05:50","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T20:05:50","slug":"ive-seen-those-english-dramas-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=2985","title":{"rendered":"I’ve seen those English dramas, too…"},"content":{"rendered":"

You know what I’ve been seeing a lot<\/i> of recently? Hyphenated compounds with -ly adverbs. (Yeah, I know, probably not your first guess.) As in, “a fully-developed plan” or “their formerly-intractable armies.” I’m right in thinking this is wrong…um, right? I don’t have a lot of grammatical pet peeves — spelling “ridiculous” with an -e is usually one of them; so is that old Harry Potter<\/i> staple “He said darkly” — but this has actually been bugging me lately. <\/p>\n

I think it’s more because it’s briefly cast doubt on what I thought I knew about grammar, and less because it’s a particularly important or vital rule. I am, in fact, having a tough time — and so would welcome any examples you might have in the comments below — of specific cases where the meaning of a phrase would be different (and thereby rendered confusing) with the hypen than without. I mean, that’s ultimately the purpose of grammar: not to force us all to speak and write the same way, but to alleviate the confusion that often arises when we don’t.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know what I’ve been seeing a lot of recently? Hyphenated compounds with -ly adverbs. (Yeah, I know, probably not your first guess.) As in, “a fully-developed plan” or “their formerly-intractable armies.” I’m right in thinking this is wrong…um, right? I don’t have a lot of grammatical pet peeves — spelling “ridiculous” with an -e … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-2985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}