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New York’s Hyphenated History
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/hojvb https://archive.is/hojvb
- pimlottc 5y agoWow. I had to click the link for the book to confirm this was all true. If it had been published on April 1st, I would have been sure it was a joke.
- nohuck13 5y ago"It was only when the pejorative phrasing of “hyphenated Americans” came into vogue in the 1890s, emboldened by Roosevelt’s anti-hyphen speech, that the pressure for the hyphen’s erasure came to pass." So the claim is that 1890's US anti-immigration campaigns caused such anti-hyphen sentiment that we abandoned the traditional hyphenation of... place names? (except for holdouts such as the New-York historical society). I am not an academic who studies punctuation over time (surely you exist!) but I... have trouble rejecting the null hypothesis of, like, grammar just evolved, and people increasingly tended to use a non-archaic spelling? If US anti-immigration campaigns did cause hyphen dropping, why don't we see any big non-American English-speaking place names with hyphens? (New-South-Wales?) Also, the text itself feels like a stretch; Roosevelt's gave his hyphenated Americans speech in 1915, not amidst the anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1890s