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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Technical Words




What do you call compounds words? And, in particular, what do you call them when you just sort of make them up on the fly: like, what would you call "words-made-up-on-the-fly-or-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" if you wanted to use it in a post?

We have portmanteau words, and we've already added "club bag" words, but this is different.

I just call them maggeph  -
(pronounced maq-qef', with the q being a k in the back of the throat).  Or  mah-keff ', if you will.

I really do not know the English technical term.
I looked it up, and only found "compound words". How bloodless compared to maggeph!

Then I found:
The “-” sign is not a dash, but a hyphen. Words that contain one or more hyphens are said to be hyphenated.

Dashes of various length are used in English writing: “–” is an en dash, and “—” is an em dash. Their names (en and em) are those of typographic units of measurements. The former is used in particular to separate dates in ranges (“Lee, Bruce (1941–73)”), and the latter is used to indicate a break of thought or an unfinished sentence.
I think I have come across these in Word and maybe Blogger, but the difference does not seem to be as large as that shown above, and to be very honest, a few micromillimeters difference in a linear stroke of black on a white background is an area of research for Particle Physics Ph.D.s, not for me to be trying to read.

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