Talk

Flip

Pedants' corner

Words being joined together

6 replies

Lifeisabeach · 22/05/2015 07:21

The classic one is "alot" for a lot, but there are a couple of others that make me irrationally annoyed, and I'm not sure whether I'm right to be.

First one is "noone" instead of no one. It isn't a word is it? I'm seeing it all the time at the moment.

The other one is "livingroom" - it's two words surely?

OP posts:

Thanks

Report

DadDadDad · 22/05/2015 09:40

Well, "alot" does look wrong to me, but are the others a big deal?

I think I'd be happy with hyphenated forms, eg no-one and living-room, and it's not too surprising if the hyphen gets dropped out. After all, nowhere, nothing, nobody, bedroom, bathroom are all single words with no hyphen. But I would agree that noone and livingroom are easy to trip over when reading (that double o in noone, the unfamiliarity of livingroom as a single word), so would avoid them in my writing to improve readability.

Thanks

Report

prism · 23/05/2015 08:10

You're right to take a dim view of "livingroom", as "living" isn't a noun, so doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing. That's why there's no sign of "sleeping bag" or whipping-boy" becoming one word, though I don't suppose people consciously think that they'll draw the line at marrying up gerunds and nouns to make new words.

"Alot" is clearly bonkers, as if we're to start uniting articles with the nouns they identify ("thelot" would qualify too), we might as well stop using articles completely and speak Russian or Latin.

And "noone", unless you are Nigel Molesworth, is the time when you might start to feel the pangs of hunger. QED.