As part of a program to beautify our highways, a sign on US131 N as you enter the southeast corner of Grand Traverse County has been replaced with a brand-spanking new one that reads:
Prison Area
Do not pickup
hitchhikers
Is it just me, or is this sign missing a space?
I've seen this in other phrasal verbs, specifically back up conflated to backup. I've even seen the past tense form backupped.
Also backuped, but that's a little too much, even for this staunch descriptivist.
I spose it equates to "pickup truck" :-(
If 'twere me writing the notice, I'd stick in not only one space but one hyphen as well.
it equates to "pickup truck"
Well, yeah. Connie's lovely pun depends on that*. But the sign should just use pick up.
*I just know I'm going to hate myself for pointing it out.
How long did/will it take for hitch-hikers and pick-up to gain/lose a hyphen? Does the 'space' evolve first or does the hyphen? How long will it take for both to disappear, leaving us with *a word? ...and will Batman escape from what is sure to be a gruesome death?
With baseball it started as two words, pickupped the hyphen, and then became one word. There was a period in there when all three variants were seen.
Funny, I just went through this same discussion about the word make-up (v. makeup) today with one of my U.S. suppliers and a client. Our assorted dictionaries spelled it in different ways depending upon its age and country of origin.
We decided to go with make-up since two out of three Canadian dictionaries spelled it that way and the product is for the Canadian market. My supplier's U.S. Webster's spelled it makeup.
I'd actually never thought about it, and I would have spelled it without the hyphen, as in H2G2. I googled and found about a 3-2 preference for the word without the hyphen, but many of the citations were the same.
And I remember this word from many years ago when a bunch of us were searching for words that had double letters in them. Double-aitch ain't that common. And thank God Exxon proved that a big oil company didn't have to be Humble.
OED2 hyphenates; W3 does not -- this suggests a bank-bias.
(or OED hasn't updated the aitches yet)
Far as I'm concerned, the general rule is that nouns have the parts stuck together, e.g., backup, as in 'the computer backup ran last night' as opposed to verbs, in which they're separate, e.g., 'I'm going to back up the computers tonight.'