After some sniffing around, I believe that your treatment of "bird-dog" ought to be up for discussion. I ask you: as a noun, even though this definition is figurative, should it be hyphenated? I think not; 'bird dog' is a separate word. Secondly, limiting the definition to 'talent scout' is too narrow. In my experience the term is used to denote anyone who seeks or closely follows anything on the move.

As a verb, it carries the nuance of being relentless. Anyone who has followed a true bird dog on the hunt understands its instinctive dedication to the task.

"bird-dog"

Hi, Argent. NB, Anu rarely reads these threads on the forum. As for compound nouns (and their derived verbs), the convention of hyphenated or not is pretty much arbitrary. Cf. base-ball in the 19th century with baseball today. I'm not sure that a missing or extant hyphen will help much in the determination of a word's part-of-speech-hood (aka lexical category, word class).

Thank you zmjezhd. Being a new guy and not too quick, I am still learning my way around. Did I post in the wrong category? Should I have posted at all; i.e., is a response such as mine welcomed or considered as insufficiently lofty, annoying nit-picking? I would appreciate your guidance on these and other matters about which I may have failed to inquire.

Argent. I forgot to add, welcome to the asylum. Opinions may differ, but yours is the sort of thing that often gets discussed hereabouts. It probably would've been better to post this in the Weekly Themes topic further down the page.

I use this phrase frequently at work. In my usage, it conveys that I'm going to follow something, but also that I'm going to worry it to death.

@ Nuncle z: I believe the standard in the 19th century was for base ball to be two separate words. It didn't get a lot of exposure as the hyphenated base-ball till the early 20th. Even that was a transitional form on the way to the modern baseball. There was a time in the '20s, '30s when all three forms were regularly seen in newspaper accounts. IIRC.

the standard in the 19th century was for base ball to be two separate words

Probably so. Thanks for the correction. Much to my shame, I did not check before posting. My point still holds, baseball has been a compound noun throughout, whether with or without hyphen or space.