February 22, 2004

I resent that. So I sent an email to someone who had recently emailed to say he was using a new email address from now on. I realized my mistake and resent the email to the new address. Before he got the second email, he replied that I'd used the old email address, which caused me to email him and say, "I resent it."

That's absurdly open to misunderstanding! Don't you write "resent" for "re-sent" all the time without noticing it might make you seem resentful? But hyphens have a way of falling out of words. "Email" is a prime example. I see Sharp Points is trying to preserve the hyphen in email (based on the fact that the "e" is a pronounced letter, not a legitimate syllable), and maybe the French have a problem with it (because it's their word for enamel), but that hyphen is just not going to survive.

But if you drop hyphens or close up words that were once two separate words, you may end up writing something that other people will see in a different way.

I went 30 years without noticing that "Superbowl" could be read as "superb owl." When you know what's supposed to be there, you don't see the alternatives. It's probably a good mental exercise to try to see alternative images in common agglomerations. You could do conceptual art based on such things. Typical observations of this kind are that "God" is "dog" spelled backwards, or "justice" could be split into "just ice." Look for new ones. I will, and I will keep you posted.

Oh, here is one more, which occurred to me once when I was having trouble painting. (I'm the lawprof who went to art school.) The word "painting" can be broken into "pain, ting!" A "ting" is "a single light metallic sound, as of a small bell." That seemed to express something about the utter insignificance of the pain painting was causing me. Ting!

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