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Re: Mousepad or mouse pad? The winner is: mouse-pad

Subject: Re: Mousepad or mouse pad? The winner is: mouse-pad
From: dmbrown -at- brown-inc -dot- com
To: Techwr-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 16:39:11 -0800

Shankar wrote:


I can only add that you missed out mouse-pad...

It gotta go the way of tele-phone, tele-vision,
and others who go through the rites of
hyphenation before union.

Flawed analogy--"mouse" is a word; "tele" is not.

The correct noun form is "mouse pad."

If you use it as a compound adjective (as in "a mouse-pad surface") then it *could* be hyphenated; but even there it's unnecessary, because there's no way to confuse it with "mouse pad-surface."

The point of hyphenating two words like this is to eliminate ambiguity. The term "mouse pad" is unambiguous, even in the adjectival form.

Nothing is gained in either hyphenation or concatenation.

--David

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