Saturday, October 23, 2010

Moby-Dick comments are appearing on my October 20 post. Add yours now! before it's too late! [too late for what, I don't know; this is merely ominous peer pressure].

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:

Maureen said...

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.

Maureen said...

Of course, it would help if I could type. The correct spelling being hyphen.

Dawn Potter said...

Still, it's curious to me that Melville spells the name one way in the title and another way in the text.