Word counts
From the 6/25/07
New Yorker,
p. 48:
NO COMMENT DEPARTMENT
From the San Francisco Chronicle.
With California Invasive Weeds Awareness Week just
around the corner (July 17-23), there are two words every Californian
should know: yellow star thistle.
Yes, I know, how silly of the
Chron
(or its source on invasive weeds):
yellow
star thistle is obviously three words. Or is it?
Counting "the number of words" in an expression is a tricky
business. The
New Yorker
staff is acting like the word counting software that comes with your
word processor: basically, it counts things separated by spaces.
That means the algorithm is sensitive to the arbitrariness of English
orthography.
English noun-noun compounds, including those whose meanings are in part
conventionalized, are written in three ways: solid (
doghouse), hyphenated (
dog-ear), separated (
dog tag). There are some
generalizations about which spelling is used for which compounds, but
there's a good bit of arbitrariness, and also significant
variation. In any case, as far as the system of English goes, for
conventionalized compounds the three types are entirely parallel, and a
dictionary of reasonable size will have entries for all three.
We're looking at "a word" in each case, regardless of how they're
written -- granted, a word that has words as its parts, but still in
some sense a word.
Dictionaries,
AHD4 for
instance, do have entries for
star
thistle (and
star anise
and
star apple and
star fruit). And my Peterson
Field Guide to Pacific States Wildflowers
(Niehaus & Ripper 1976) has the yellow star thistle (
Centaurea solstitialis) listed in
its index under "star thistle, yellow" (also under "thistle, yellow
star", using the head noun
thistle
of the compound
star thistle).
So you could argue that
yellow star
thistle is in fact a two-word expression:
yellow plus the compound noun
star thistle.
[Yes,
solstitialis, suitable
for this season of the year. And the pernicious yellow star
thistles are in fact blooming on the hillsides.]
[Addendum 6/26: Mae Sander has written with a plausible proposal about how the
Chron ended up with "yellow star thistle": the piece originally had "yellow starthistle" -- this spelling can be found in many publications, for instance the University of California Cooperative Extension
fact sheet on the plant -- but a proofreader "fixed" the spelling by separating the two parts of "starthistle" (I myself dislike this spelling, because I'm inclined to (mis)read it as "start-histle"). Now, this requires a proofreader who isn't really reading the text for content, but there are such people -- people who would change "an item of data is" to "an item of data are" because, sigh, they change
ALL instances of "data is" to "data are".]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 23, 2007 08:29 PM