Readers today are unlikely to confuse an adolescent with an armload of brushwood used for fences and hedges. Still, The New Yorker’s copy editors dutifully hyphenate “teen-ager.”
From Mary Norris of the New Yorker –
Several hundred copy editors descended on Providence, Rhode Island, this past weekend for the annual conference of the American Copy Editors Society (ACES), now trending on Twitter as #ACES2019. (We can dream, can’t we?)
If you have ever been a copy editor among copy editors, you know the joy of being in the company of your fellow-nerds, and hearing them speak out loud of things that normally stay inside your head: arguments about the singular “they,” musings about whether to capitalize a proper name that begins with a lowercase letter (d’Anjou, for instance) if it occurs at the beginning of a sentence. (I say yes, but perhaps I am insensitive.)
