Friday, September 27, 2019

Hyphens and mental health

1. Liddle is a word. (But does Donald Trump know that?) From the Oxford English Dictionary:
In regional pronunciation, or representing the speech of non-English-speakers or children; = LITTLE adj.
The first citation (1906) is from Rudyard Kipling: “Come along o’ me while I lock up my liddle hen-house.” A later citation, from Arthur Kober (1945):
You wanna be a crook, be awready a big fella! . . . But a liddle fella, where he got the chutzpah to be a crook?
Mistah Trump, he’s a big fella.

2. Liddle’ is not a word. Perhaps the president is thinking of lil’, as in Lil’ Kim or li’l, as in Li’l Trumpy.

3. An apostrophe or accent is not a hyphen. Liddle’ reminds me of what people used to do trying to create an accented letter on a typewriter: cafe′.

4. Discribing is not an accepted variant.

5. “I spelled the word liddle wrong”: well, he did. But words used as words take italics or quotation marks: liddle, or “liddle.” See nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 above.

6. Low ratings and never ending need hyphens. You — not CNN — left hyphens out, you dolt.

7. The president is not well.

[I suspect that the missing “hyphen” will be found with the missing strawberries.]

comments: 6

Daughter Number Three said...

Does that qualify as the most errors in a single one of his tweets so far? I think it might.

Michael Leddy said...

And all genuine. Kellyanne Conway did not type this one.

Fresca said...

Thank you for writing about Our Dolt.
I can't stand to read him, but I love what you pick out--
you are my news filter!

Michael Leddy said...

I’m curating! :)

Frex said...

Artisinally crafted blogging!

Michael Leddy said...

Yes, every post crafted, then honed, though the honing often takes place after I hit Publish.