I was looking for a coupon yesterday and came across the following in the Borders Rewards email I received on July 15:

"Brady Bledsoe is truly an all-American: a straight-laced star quarterback who's honoring his promise to his mother to remain celibate in college."



I know that dictionaries list "straightlaced" as a variant of straitlaced, but I'm fairly certain that the latter is correct and that neither is hyphenated. The best I could do as a reference for this, though, is here: http://www.bartleby.com/68/56/5756.html

Can anyone direct me to a better citation?

How about the capitalization of "all-American?" The NCAA, at least, seems to capitalize the first A and they ought to know.

When Borders was just a store in Ann Arbor, they used to give job applicants a written test and required that they demonstrate familiarity with broad areas of literature and a specialization in at least one. I don't suppose they do that since the company was acquired, do they? I guess it's also unlikely that that email was written by a retail employee.

forgive my non-responsiveness, but what's your issue with The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, one of the many fine Bartleby reference resources?

in a more responsive vein, here is the entry from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:

The straight- spellings originated as errors, and they are still regarded as errors by many people. Because of their common occurrence in reputable publications, however, they are recognized as standard variants in almost all current dictionaries.

No issue, really, and I shouldn't have said "better." I was mostly looking for something that addressed the hyphenation and didn't dilute my prescriptive rage with a descriptive "gh"-concession.

Fiske pops up top of the charts in a Google Books search on "straight-laced", with Garner coming in fifth (link). The earliest use I came across in the same set of search results is 1820, in a court case (link). (There are plenty more examples from the 19th century, but I'll leave those for the reader to pursue.)

The NCAA is handing out what are basically titles which should be capitalized, e.g. just because someone says "Coach of the Year" doesn't mean coach or year should always be capitalized.
Even so if you search for "all-american" on their site, you can see they use it both ways.
"2005 NCAA discus champion and four-time all-American in the discipline"
and
"GTE Academic All-American Volleyball Player of the Year"

Right you are. I thought I'd dug deep enough into their site to find both styles, if they were there, but obviously I didn't. Thanks!

I had just assumed that the "gh" was a Brit vs US'n spelling variation like the "u" in honour.

welcome, duncan!

I'm not sure they're actually calling him AN ALL-American(as a[n] NCAA honoree), as opposed to just saying he's all-American.

{although my stomach turns a bit at the idea that to be all-American is to be a football star and celibate. god, what century is this?}

ditto.

My Collins Compact Australian Dictionary has both as acceptable here, though they are under 'strait-' as the major variant. They are also both hyphenated. Australians would use either spelling fairly randomly I think.

It's fairly common for two word phrases that have become linked like 'strait' and 'laced' in this context (does that make them a constituent?) to go through a two step process going through hyphenization to becoming a single word.

I like to call them, "Joycean compounds."

don't you mean Joyce-Ian compounds?