[RELEASE] 4.2.0 announcements and preliminary tarballs

[Matt Thompson]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 14:21 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> 
> actually, there's a valid reason for this unrelated to marketing.  if
> you're saying "product X is easy to use", you'd likely not use the
> hyphenation, but, if you're using it in an adjectival list, you probably
> would hyphenate, to better distinguish items in the list: "product X is
> green, large, easy-to-use, friendly, and quite wealthy.  the concept here
> is the "adjective phrase".  "easy-to-use" in this context is a single
> entity.

This is what I was thinking, although I didn't have the correct name for
it.  Glad to know I wasn't too off.

> actually, the main only reason *not* to use the hypenation (as
> in the first) case, is because people tend not to like hyphens.

Really?  I use them a lot.  Maybe I'll have to set up a script when I
start doing my thesis wholeheartedly.  I seem to be a hyphen and
semicolon user to-the-extreme; moreover...

> there's
> a great book about english punctuation in general - "eats, shoots, and
> leaves" by someone i can't remember - that's a must-have for anyone who's
> as anal about punctuation as i am.

Well, then, those should have been em dashes (--) rather than
hyphens. ;-P  I know this because the PGDP people rapped my knuckles on
one of my first proofreads.  (And it's by Lynne Truss, NPR favorite.)

Matt
-- 
Learning just means you were wrong and they were right. - Aram
   Matt Thompson -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/
   440 UCB, Boulder, CO  80309-0440
   JILA A510, 303-492-4662
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