You be the blogger
Okay, Sheepish is right, I need a new category for the house-buying stuff. I am way too lazy to go back and check all my house-buying posts to figure out which are about *buying* and which about *fixing*, so it’s reader input time! What shall I rename this category to? Right now “homeownership sucks” is way in the lead, but that’s because it’s the only one I’ve thought of in the at least 30 seconds I gave to it.
Please? I am so entirely unoriginal right now.
October 31st, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Umm, how about the home front? There, you have the benefit of my 30 seconds. And worth every penny you paid for it.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:27 pm
If you have anything like my experience, it’ll be The Money Pit.
October 31st, 2005 at 7:29 pm
I don’t know, but I feel somehow compelled to point out that the Toronto Star, when it needs to break the word homeowner across a line, does so like this:
October 31st, 2005 at 8:44 pm
ACW, that is not bitter enough for me. (As opposed to the supremely bitter category name “kitties”.)
Orthoclase, I think I am going to be forced to agree with you. A new toilet! Argh.
Q, well, I think that the m is really part of that next syllable, so I think that is the choice they have to make based on syllable breaks. Of course normal people would say ‘damn phonology! I will use morphology!’ but editors are not normal.
October 31st, 2005 at 10:38 pm
If the Toronto Star spells it homoaner from now on no one will be surprised when they hyphenate it:
blah blah blah blah ho-
moaner blah blah blah
Come to think of it, would that be a sufficiently bitter category name?
November 1st, 2005 at 9:46 am
Or homemoanership, perhaps. (The thing about ho-moaner is that it might make some people think it was about… tilth.)
I agree about the syllable boundary in homeowner, but:
1. Whenever I see it, I don’t read it as homeowner; I always wonder what meowning is, and whether it’s like meowing only more nasal.
2. I don’t think it’s an editorial choice; I think it’s the output of a hyphenation program that doesn’t know the word homeowner.
November 1st, 2005 at 11:56 am
Okay, I looked it up. There is one major rule, no splitting words so that the first syllables look misleading: coincidence cannot be split coin-cidence and coinage cannot be split co-inage (this is moronic because that is splitting in the middle of a syllable). So ho-meowner passes that rule.
Then there are two methods, the British one, which is essentially morphology (which they called etymology, but was clearly morphology) first and the American one, which is phonology first. So ho-meowner is acceptable. Annoying, but acceptable.
I vote no on ho-moaner, for the same obvious reason.
November 1st, 2005 at 12:08 pm
Sheesh, if I new I was going to be quizzed on my suggestion, I’d've (yay double contractions!) thought twice about suggesting it. All I can think of are sappy things or slightly bitter cheesy things (ala “home is where the heartbreak is”).