Word Breaks

The rules for hyphenating a word at the end of a typewritten line are simple. Any computer can be, and all have been, fed these rules. But there also many times where these rules do not apply, such as in compound words. It takes an understanding of the meaning to know when to ignore the rule. For example, one rule is to hyphenate a word between syllables; another is to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant, which is where most syllable breaks occur. But what is a syllable? Until computers can be taught semantics -- the meanings of words and syllables -- they will continue to blindly follow the rules.

Why is this a problem? Consider compound words, where a two-word verb phrase becomes a one-word noun. Computers at the New York Times missed out with the noun "tradeoff." It starts life as a verb, "to trade off," and becomes a single word when used as a noun. But the hyphenation rule says to break up the word between a vowel and a consonant when it reaches the end of a line in type. Thus, the NYT computer perpetrated "tra-deoff."

The solution has been available for decades. Computers have, in addition to the set of rules, a lexicon of words and their preferred hyphenation. But it takes human intervention to add words to the list.

Let's hope newspapers (and magazines) assign someone to add words to the list whenever a sharp-eyed copy editor catches a misplaced hyphen.

SPELLCHECK CHECKUP -- There is a province in France called Provence. Don't mess with it. The Oxford University Press, of any house, should know better, but somehow in a caption the name of a town came out as Aix-en-Province, while the text had it, properly, as Aix-en-Provence.