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If you speak English, you've probably heard a least once in your life that German is super cool and amazing in a way that English is not because German has "a long word for everything" which they make by concatenating smaller words. The funny thing is that English does that too. It's just that when we write out lexical units like "girl scout uniform" or "public defender's office" or "bus terminal" we put the spaces in between the constituent parts, and in German they mostly don't. This is an issue of orthography, nothing more. The definition of "word" is not "something we write with spaces around it".
And "mental health care desert" is a great example - a lexical unit that's somehow more than the sum of its four morphemes. You need to understand the phrase as a whole.
That's actually not why I posted this. No, I posted this to go "WTF?" at their weird hyphenation.
So, first of all, outside of The New Yorker we've all been moving away from hyphenation. Secondly - and possibly as a result of this trend - nobody hyphenates "health care" to begin with. It's "health care" or maybe "healthcare". So if you're going to hyphenate, even though you probably shouldn't, that's not the part of the phrase you tag together. "Mental-health-care-desert" works, or possibly even "mental-health-care desert" (since "mental health care" is an existing concept and "desert" is clearly analogous with "food desert", but "mental health-care desert" looks deeply weird and unsettling.
It is very wrong and I do not like it. Nor, for the record, do I like the fact that people are suffering from mental health effects related to COVID.
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( Read more... )
If you speak English, you've probably heard a least once in your life that German is super cool and amazing in a way that English is not because German has "a long word for everything" which they make by concatenating smaller words. The funny thing is that English does that too. It's just that when we write out lexical units like "girl scout uniform" or "public defender's office" or "bus terminal" we put the spaces in between the constituent parts, and in German they mostly don't. This is an issue of orthography, nothing more. The definition of "word" is not "something we write with spaces around it".
And "mental health care desert" is a great example - a lexical unit that's somehow more than the sum of its four morphemes. You need to understand the phrase as a whole.
That's actually not why I posted this. No, I posted this to go "WTF?" at their weird hyphenation.
So, first of all, outside of The New Yorker we've all been moving away from hyphenation. Secondly - and possibly as a result of this trend - nobody hyphenates "health care" to begin with. It's "health care" or maybe "healthcare". So if you're going to hyphenate, even though you probably shouldn't, that's not the part of the phrase you tag together. "Mental-health-care-desert" works, or possibly even "mental-health-care desert" (since "mental health care" is an existing concept and "desert" is clearly analogous with "food desert", but "mental health-care desert" looks deeply weird and unsettling.
It is very wrong and I do not like it. Nor, for the record, do I like the fact that people are suffering from mental health effects related to COVID.
( Read more... )
