Startups, start-ups & other sticky situations

I love when a situation arises that forces me to question my own judgment and knowledge. Perhaps I’m still gun-shy from the other day’s ‘Til v. Till debacle but I love when a grammar rule or convention trips me up.

This happened recently while I was copyediting for a technology client. The original copy had the word “startup” (as in, a new business) spelled both with and without a hyphen. I’m a stickler for consistency. Spell something wrong, and people may not know it – as long as you’re consistent in that misspelling. I changed them all to the hyphenated “start-up” and then thought better of it. Why?

More and more, we see words where the hyphens could be dropped. Startup, like online (as a noun) seemed to flow well without the hyphen… maybe I was wrong?

The AP book has us put a hyphen before words when they’re used as an adjective before a noun, such as:

- Using a well-known actor’s name in your blog title may get you some extra hits.
- The actor is well known, so I included his name in my blog title.

Following that rule, start-up company would be hyphenated. But under what circumstances would you lose the hyphen altogether? When we use it as an adjective after a noun, it can be two words. Or condensed into one… depending on the word.

Brian L. Burns has an interesting theory on this. He makes some cogent arguments for using “startup” all the time.

Unfortunately, if you want to transfer the rule to other hyphenated words, his argument is a lot more complicated than “use the hyphen when it precedes a noun, drop it when it is the noun or when it follows the noun.”

Burns’ blog post focuses on what looks good, artistically, and whether the two words can stand alone and paint a clear picture. The example, to me, seems pretty arbitrary and depends largely on the writer’s perception of the words. This can lead to arguments with editors and hot grammatical debates.

Dropdown? Dropside? Drop-side?
This morning, I encountered a similar situation while blogging about the anticipated CPSC recall of a massive number of baby cribs. The cribs to be recalled are those with dropdown sides. The industry seems to have shortened the term to “drop-side cribs” or even “drop side” or “dropside.” I’m noticing all three spellings, even within the same articles, and now I’m wondering: Is this influenced by keyword searches?

A quick look at Google Adwords: Keyword tool shows dropside with nearly double the amount of searches as drop side, and drop-side doesn’t make the list (yet). The news reports based on the CPSC “leak” mostly use drop-side, so that may change in reports for November.

Twitter Affecting Language Usage?
To go back to the start-up v. startup debate, Brian Burns’ blog makes another point. He’s all for conciseness and clarity. In today’s world of micro-blogging, if you can save one character out of 140, why not do so and drop any hyphens that aren’t entirely necessarily?

Hence, that brings me back to my original conclusion: startup over start-up, except when it’s an adjective preceding a noun… because that would just be wrong and there’s no way I can rationalize it.

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