COVID-19 is taking a heavy toll in America’s mental health-care deserts

[conuly]

Link to article.

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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Comments

[bibliofile]

Yeah, someone really should rewrite that phrase.

(Technically, the hyphenation is correct, but I'm not going into why/how. Just rewrite the damn thing, geez.)

[rhoda_rants]

Hyphens are the bane of my writing life. Every variation you included seems both right and wrong at the same time and I hate it. Which is why I have one beta reader in particular who will catch all my wrong hyphens and tell me how to fix them.

[hudebnik]

I don't know the rules (if any) for "correct" hyphenation, but when I see "A-B-C D" it makes me think "A B C" is a single concept that functions grammatically as an adjective or adverb modifying "D". By which logic "mental-health-care deserts" is indeed better than "mental health-care deserts", which would mean health-care deserts that are mental.

[bibliofile]

You're not the only one! I'm a professional, and I usually have to look it up.

[conuly]

If the hyphenation is jarring to the point that it needs rewriting, it is not correct.

[conuly]

When it comes to hyphens, just say no.

[al_zorra]

Hyphenating is changing a lot; things I always hyphenated no longer are. As you point out too, we're starting to make some two word designation a single word. One notices this a lot when the d*mned auto spell checker manages to turn itself back on. So often words that I know are spelled correctly are incorrect according to snooty spell checker.

[archersangel]

the east german maps are interesting.

[greghousesgf]

yeah, the New Yorker likes to put hyphens in words like "teenager" and "ice cream" which looks really bizarre and anachronistic. (I also think it looks just plain strange in a Victorian way when they use "see" as a euphemism for "have sex with".)

[conuly]

They also love their diaereses.

[conuly]

It's amazing that this difference has lasted so long. How long was there even a division at all?

[adafrog]

That's like the people who like to put comma's everywhere's because they're no't sure where' they go, so t'hey put th'em as man'y spot's as possible. :/

[conuly]

Those are, apostrophes.

[adafrog]

That's tot'ally, what' I me,ant. lolol

Ah, need to go to bed.

[archersangel]

east germany (german democratic republic) existed from 1949 to 1990.

[dorchadas]

This

A) Reminds me of the "video games or videogames" argument and

B) makes me process that phase as two separate subphrases divided by a hyphen--"mental health" and "care desert."