Book Review: One Word, Two Words, Hyphenated?

One Word, Two Words, Hyphenated?
by Mary Louise Gilman
ISBN 1-881859-01-0
184 pages; softcover
NCRA Press, 1998
800-272-6272
$7.95

Mary Louise Gilman understands. As Associate Editor of SPELL/Binder, the publication of the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, she understands the English language. As Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Court Reporting from 1974 to 1986, she understands what court reporters are looking for in a reference book.

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

In One Word, Two Words, Hyphenated?, Gilman gives us more. The book answers one question, and one question only: the one posed in the title. It contains 14,000 words and phrases, and tells you how each word or phrase should appear in your transcript or your captions.

You might think that a good dictionary obviates the need for a book like Gilman's. You'd be wrong. Even my Webster's Third, Unabridged doesn't contain null-space, nuts and bolts, or fast track (two words as a noun phrase, hyphenated as a verb or adjective).

It's impossible for such a reference work to always be current when the language is a moving target. There's no question that we're making a transition from e-mail to email. The question is when the transition will be deemed complete. Gilman had to list realtime, real-time, and real time separately to define the various usages. She built this book by attempting to establish consensus among a long list of dictionaries, thus saving you and I the job.

It's easy to sum up this review in one paragraph. Are you a court reporter, captioner, scopist, or transcriber? Then this book should be on your reference shelf. Now.