Hi Alex, At 2023-07-16T03:31:54+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/hyphens.asp > > [criticizing that link] > > + Examples: > + an off-campus apartment > + state-of-the-art design > + > + When a compound adjective follows a noun, a hyphen is usually not > + necessary. > + > + Example: The apartment is off campus. > > What? "is" is a verb. The compound adjective follows a verb, not a > noun. Or does it mean after in the sense that anything can come in > between, as long as it's the noun which it modifies and it has come > before the adjective? Is that a valid use of the word "follows"? I'm > not native, but that sounds, ughh. You're right that they employed an unhelpful example. The apartment example affords an ambiguous syntactical parse, which a hyphen _can_ clarify. A. The apartment is off-campus. Here "off-campus" is an attributive phrase, and "is" is what some primary school educators in the U.S. call a "linking verb"; in some languages, my impression is that a "zero copula", meaning no verb at all, is permitted or even preferred there. Renderings of broken English are often presented this way in literature and entertainment. A1. *The apartment off-campus. analogue: *My dog old and sick. Because natural language demands a bit of Postel's Law, the foregoing are generally understood by English speakers despite their non-standard structure. But consider the following alternative. B. The apartment is off campus and in a suburb. Here we can parse the sentence as compounding two predicate adjectives that are in the form of prepositional phrases, and therefore _not_ hyphenated. One of the reasons I think grammarbook's example is a poor one is that _semantically_, one infers the same information regardless of which _syntactical_ parse one uses. Where possible, examples should be selected to indicate potential miscommunication, as in this classic illustration of the value of the Oxford example from a young Objectivist penning acknowledgments in a thesis for school. *I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God. > BTW, that's the only case where it says to not use hyphens, and since > by being alone it's necessarily not following a noun, I'd say it > doesn't fall in this rule, and so a hyphen would be deserved. I'd agree. I cite authorities only because I cannot expect people to take only my word at such things. My authority as a grammarian is limited. Unlike some, I don't have God and Ayn Rand for parents. > I don't see reasons to avoid it in the links above. > > So, I'm tending to conclude that it's necessary, or at least useful or > tasteful. Please quote the relevant parts if you disagree. Recalling the case at issue: .BR MSG_ERRQUEUE " (" recvmsg "() only; since Linux 2.2)" I would find the addition of a hyphen before "only" to be superfluous. As I said before, it disambiguates nothing. Further, if any of these annotations ever has to be compounded, as in a man page that documents several functions but requires annotation only for a subset of them, the use of hyphens as you intend is liable to add clutter. .BR MSG_BAZQUEUE " (" foomsg "()-, " barmsg "()-only; since Linux 7.99)" Consider also the possibility that you may want to invert set membership; perhaps 6 out of 7 functions in a page accept a certain parameter. .BR MSG_BAZQUEUE " (not " quxmsg "(); since Linux 7.99)" There is no correct place for a hyphen here. > > commit 43b89c2304552b18c9a9ea02bca05ffd94d6518c (HEAD -> master) > > Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@xxxxxxxxx> > > Date: Sat Jul 15 14:54:32 2023 -0500 > > > > man-pages(7): Add attributive annotation advice. > > > > Prompted-by: Alejandro Colomar <alx@xxxxxxxxxx> > > We use Reported-by: (mostly for bug fixes), Suggested-by: (for > features), or when none fits, just Cc:. Okay. > > Signed-off-by: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@xxxxxxxxx> > > LGTM. Please send a patch. Will do. I've gotten sidetracked by the great automated "Mr. Sed"[1] project, which turns out to have some prerequisites if I am to demonstrate no changes in formatted text as I intend. Early findings: 1. I think I have raised warnings to this list before about manipulating adjustment and hyphenation outside of table regions with `ad` and `hy` requests; the Linux man-pages do so systematically around hundreds of tables, attempting (but failing) to (reliably) "reset" them after tables, often with miserable results. Fixing this is a separate, prior sed(1) project. 2. An ".sp 1" hack, also after tables, to work around a groff pre-1.23.0 bug is also not necessary and the time to sweep it away is near. I may not _have_ to do this one to satisfy "Mr. Sed", though. I will keep you advised. Regards, Branden [1] the rewrite of man page cross references to use the new groff 1.23.0 `MR` macro, a feature I have written about on this list before and which is covered in the release announcement sent here earlier this month by Bertrand Garrigues
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