[IMG]www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/2012/03/08#mutable_758065[/IMG]

Here's the picture Russell was going for:

Thanks.

This doesn't quite fit the subject, but bothers me:

The line is "so you're telling me there's a chance" and yet it's more common for people to say "you're saying there's a chance!"

Number of results in Google, with quotation marks:
"you're saying there's a chance" - 463,000
"you're telling me there's a chance" - 367,000

There are youtube clips with "saying" in the title. How could someone edit the clip and mess up the line?

Here's something I just read that made me think again about the usefulness of the hyphen. (It's from a rather weak, though well-reviewed-on-Amazon, academic mystery; I won't bother naming it.)
That left me with quite a bizarre image until I realized that what the author meant for me to understand was:

yes but russell:

do you insist that people write out, "so for lunch, I had a ham-and-cheese sandwich"?

maybe you do, but I'm certainly not going to fault some writer who leaves out the hyphens because they look "funny" or "wrong" in the larger context of his prose / style

like, you're weighing ambiguity against style here, and sometimes style gets to win, even if it means that people for whom the collocation (thank you, TTI) "x and y grinder" (and just the word "grinder" in general as a slangy synonym for "sub sandwich") is unfamiliar will have to pause, reread, maybe look something up

when as a writer you're balancing a million (often) competing priorities every time you put down a phrase, sometimes there doesn't exit a solution or arrangement that satisfies all of them, and even top-level ones like "universally and unequivocally and immediately comprehensible to all English speakers wherever they're from" can get axed

Play it again, Sam imo

I wouldn't mind it, but "a ham and cheese sandwich" is also fine because no ambiguity is possible. However, "pepper grinder" is so much more frequently a meaningful collocation than is "sausage and pepper"; so I would certainly advise any writer to avoid this hyphenless phrase to keep from calling up in the reader's mind the comical image of her character simultaneously biting down on a huge sausage and on a pepper grinder!

There are a lot of good reasons for writers to ask readers to pause over his or her prose or to think again about what they've just read -- but unnecessary and unintentional ambiguity isn't one of them.

you're assuming things here about the story's world and author's aesthetic sensibilities which may not apply

also, your logic seems flawed, or I'm misreading you, so let me rephrase: I think it's perfectly fine for a writer who considers "sausage and pepper grinder" to be a meaningful collocation (in addition to "pepper grinder," incidentally) to care less about minimizing momentary confusion across the entirety of the English-speaking world and more about throwing in hyphens that are "wrong" for or "foreign" to the vernacular / idiomatic / colloquial / stylistic qualities of the world and feel and sound his story's portraying

which is why I tried to demonstrate how competing aesthetic priorities will sometimes demand, necessitate, and intentionally produce a phrasing wherein ambiguity is not minimized across the entirety of the English-speaking universe, so that, yes, people who've never heard of a "sausage and pepper grinder," the sandwich, can only fall back on "pepper grinder" in some confusion, while those "in the know" won't have this problem

so what? will you next tell me that anyone who fills his book with slangy regionalisms immediately familiar only to some small population, and a source of interpretive struggle, difficulty, and learning to everyone else, needs to go back and stick in hyphens and footnotes and clarifying synonyms to minimize all potential instances of readerly misconstrual?

the over-rigid extension of maxims and golden principles of "felicitous" composition from the realm of expository writing to domains like fiction or poetry is, I think, what may be motivating your stance here; or perhaps not poetry, because it so clearly stands in its own sphere, whereas fiction (and even varieties of non-fictional prose) at least categorically and formally resembles the kind of "tight, clean, clear, [insert your own platitude from The Elements of Style]" writing so prized in the expository and related formats, which seem to think their laws are fit and just for all of prose, when really they're its simplest incarnation

Add the word "so," and:

"So you're saying there's a chance" - 151,000
"So you're telling me there's a chance" - 348,000

The sandwich which is called a "sausage and pepper grinder" is never hyphenated, but it probably should be written as a proper name like "Sausage and Pepper Grinder", which may or may not help those unfamiliar with it.

Just because some readers won't "get it" is no reason to write it incorrectly in an attempt to educate them. We could think of many examples of multi-word names that don't make sense unless you are familiar with them.

Is there really ambiguity when pretty much no one but a state fair geek has ever eaten a pepper grinder with grinder being in the sense of something that grinds pepper? The only thing I can see is not knowing that a grinder can refer to a type of sandwich. If you don't know that, then biting into a sausage grinder would be just as confusing.

There won't be much ambiguity when one tries consciously to suss it out. But at the pace of casual reading, where imagery is less consciously untangled and more "projected" from the text to the imagination, a nontrivial % of good, focused readers will be confused at first. Or visualize nonsensical imagery. Large vaginas spat watermelons at the pirouetting banana. That's not always a bad thing, though.

The word "whose" always trips me out for some reason.

Pop quiz:

These 2 words in the English language are both homophones and antonyms.

I know this because they're both used in an R.E.M. song for that reason.

didn't click spoiler but i'm guessing there is some world leader pretend itt

From OOTV... this titled me. this guy has posted several times and I think has no distinction between 'have' and 'of'...

whoever that is has some pretty sick syntactical ambitions; it makes me wonder how long I can "quite legibly" run on without a comma:

I am a caffeine-addicted explorer of the lesser-known erogenous zones which if it offends any small but vocal special interest group with one or two unusually violent members planning to ambush me in the middle of the night to chop off my ring finger and symbol of my desire for a many-babied family, have mercy


now beat my score, suckas

I'm not entirely sure why one would try to even write a very long sentence without commas unless they had literally nothing else to do as they probably would if it were a late morning and they just woke up after a long night filled with some kind of work that necessitated recuperation time or some **** and so but then therefore I politely decline your interesting challenge, sir.

I hear what you're saying and respect your decision even though I think you're being a bit of a fusspot and potentially disgracing entire lineages of Zorro-like amateur internet grammarians who'd never dream of shrinking from any challenge to their abilities regardless of circumstances or tummy aches or irritable bowl syndrome or whatever mental or physical difficulties misfortune has heaped upon you in its uncannily focused way and in its almost demonic tendency to target certain persons at certain times for exclusive punishment, that sadistic slut.

This is like punctuation prog rock.

I finally made it through this entire thread and have enjoyed it immensely. I just popped on here to relate a story that you may or may not find amusing.

Last fall, I'm watching an LSU football game. My wife, a University of Michigan grad, and my daughter, a junior in high school, are in the room. A picture of Les Miles appears on the screen. I'm going to tell my wife some great story about him and his UM connections (that she couldn't care less about), so I turn to her and say, "Hey, that's Les Miles." Immediately, I hear, "Fewer miles." I look over at my daughter, and she says, "It's 'fewer miles,' Dad. You don't say 'less miles,' you say 'fewer miles.'"

Laughing, I say to her, "No, his name is 'Les Miles.'" She looks at me with a blank stare on her face and says, "Wait, what? Why would you name your kid 'Less Miles?' It's grammatically incorrect."

<crossing my fingers that I haven't completely butchered the grammar and punctuation in this post>

Bingo!

That is awesome. Your daughter rules.