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Posted By: belligerentyouth setup vs. set-up - 07/26/05 09:53 AM
Sorry, not sure if this has been done to death (difficult to search), but I was wondering if AWADers agree with this style guide on the above - it seems fairly sensible to me:

setup, set-up, set up
There are subtle differences between these three. Setup, a noun, is common in modern computer parlance to mean the installation of a computer program and can be used by extension to refer to the creation of an entity such as a company.
Create a setup file in under 40 days.
Setup costs and monthly fees can be exorbitant.
Set-up with a hyphen (also a noun) should still be used to refer to an organisation or arrangement already in place,
Nice set-up you have here.
or to a fixed contest or ambush,
The knockout in the fourth round was a set-up.
I didn’t realise that it was a set-up; even when I found a horse’s head on my doorstep.
The third option, set up, follows the rule of many adjectives where the addition of a preposition gives it a more precise meaning.
‘Sue Ridge Plumbers’ was set up a few years ago and has regular clients.
Also note that a tennis player may at some point in a match be a set up.
http://www.unisa.edu.au/staff/copystds.asp

Posted By: Faldage Re: setup vs. set-up - 07/26/05 10:46 AM
The third option, set up, follows the rule of many adjectives where the addition of a preposition gives it a more precise meaning.

‘Sue Ridge Plumbers’ was set up a few years ago and has regular clients.


Adjective? Preposition? Nuh-unh. It's a phrasal verb:

Set up your business in less than three months with BizWhiz®, the small business setup software.

As for the tennis player, they're up a set. It's not an example of the term set up; it's just two words next to each other in a sentence. One could just as well say:

a tennis player may at some point in a match be up a set.

Other than that, I'll go along with the first two points. I have seen increasing use of the single word, unhypenated form in this and other words of this type (e.g., backup/back up) as the verb, even to the point of being past-tensed as, e.g., backuped.

Posted By: AnnaStrophic Re: setup vs. set-up - 07/26/05 11:29 AM
phrasal verb

Yeah! Straight out of German, nicht wahr?

Posted By: Churl Pat backuped - 07/26/05 11:29 AM
Oh, dear, how unfortunate. Actually, how grotesque.

And misspelled also, as everyone should know upped has two ps.

Posted By: belligerentyouth Re: setup vs. set-up - 07/26/05 11:33 AM
Thanks Faldage for that confirmation. Perhaps I should have mentioned that it was the noun usage that I was interested in, not the phrasal verb (which it clearly is).

Not exactly sure what the ratio is between 'setup' and 'set-up' in technical circles. So I'd be happy to hear any reports. As to the wider topic of hyphen usage in nouns and adjectives, etc... I found this quite interesting:

from The Times, August 21, 2003
Is the hyphen making a dash for extinction?
By Robin Young


THE hyphen may be heading for extinction, according to the editors of a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English published today.
Angus Stevenson, one of the editors, said yesterday: “Our research showed that overall the hyphen is now used only half as much as it was ten years ago.” And that is despite a new use found for aberrant hyphens, which are now being slotted into phrasal verbs, as in “now is the time to top-up your pension” or “this website was set-up by Vicky”.
But Mr Stevenson said: “This use of hyphens is not yet accepted as standard English and should be avoided in careful writing.”
It is easy, though, to see how it has come about. “Nouns derived from phrasal verbs, such as ‘it’s a set-up’ or ‘time for a top-up’ have long been typically hyphenated,” Mr Stevenson said. “The new usage is an extension of that.”
Up to 20 or 30 years ago, he added, compounds formed by placing one noun in front of another were generally hyphenated, as in “fish-shop” or “dog-bowl”. Now such words are generally written separately (eg cat flap) or run together, as in “website” or “airfare”.
“In the 1950s,” Mr Stevenson added, “even familiar words such as teenager and lipstick were often hyphenated, and street signs used to hyphenate names: for example, St-Giles or West-Street”.
The Oxford lexicographers assessed the hyphen’s present parlous condition by comparing two corpuses of complete texts, databases of 100 million words each, prepared ten years apart. They discovered that there were twice as many hyphens in the British National Corpus, prepared in the early 1990s, as in the new Oxford English Corpus. Mr Stevenson said: “Hyphens are still found clarifying longer phrases, such as ‘trade-union reforms’, or where there is a verb involved, as in ‘calcium-derived substances’.” Apostrophes, Mr Stevenson thinks, may be next to go.
Tim Austin, the author of The Times Style and Usage Guide, said that it would be a “great pity” if the hyphen were to disappear altogether.
“It enables language to be used in a fuller and richer way, as indeed does the apostrophe,” said Mr Austin, who recently retired after ten years as chief revise editor of The Times. But he added that hyphenation was “always a very contentious area” and every media organisation needed its own rules on the topic.


Posted By: nancyk Re: setup vs. set-up - 07/26/05 01:30 PM
Although personally partial to hyphens (eg, I prefer set-up to setup as the noun form), I think the hyphen is indeed on the way out. IMO, they are useful clarifiers in many cases.

Posted By: Zed Re: backuped - 07/26/05 06:55 PM
Backuped should only be used when referring to species with their feet on the wrong way round.

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