Can someone explain why the book is named Moby-Dick and the whale is named Moby Dick?
In baseball news: Texas Rangers! I'm finding it easy to ignore the George Bush undertones and concentrate on the Nolan Ryan overtones.
In reading news: I'm reading Bill Evans's liner notes to the 1959 Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. It's like reading a recipe from a cookbook that calls for ingredients that are only available by mail order from one small shop in an obscure town in Sweden. I love it.
Dinner tonight: pork pie.
3 comments:
You made me curious about that hypen. One answer is given here:
http://englishplus.com/news/news0699.htm
"Hyphens were more widely used in the nineteenth century. Did you know, for example, that Herman Melville hyphenated the title of his most famous novel? He called it Moby-Dick. In many cases, the hyphens are no longer used. They either have gone back to be two words or have become one word. A lot of biological names that were hyphenated an no longer are. For example, the common North American woodland plant the May apple used to be hyphenated most of the time; nowadays, it seldom is."
Apparently, the use of the hyphen has captured many people's attention. Google reports several thousand results.
Of course, it would help if I could type. The correct spelling being hyphen.
Still, it's curious to me that Melville spells the name one way in the title and another way in the text.
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