English Language & Usage Asked by wordsmitten on February 12, 2021
My initial attempt to settle the question with a google search didn’t help as much as I’d hoped:
A search for ‘high schooler’ revealed approximately 4% of results employing the hyphenated form.
A search for ‘middle schooler’ revealed a significantly higher rate: 20% of entries employed the hyphenated form. (Including this recent article.)
A search for ‘elementary schooler’ revealed no use of the hyphenated “elementary-schooler” within the first 100 entries. (I stopped looking after that.) So, effectively, less than 1%.
Based on this search, it would seem that “middle-schooler” is somewhat acceptable and “elementary-schooler” is not acceptable. “High-schooler”, however, is unclear.
What I’m needing to decide right now regards the usage of “high-schooler” which I personally prefer to “high schooler”. Even though google search trends suggest “high schooler” is used much more frequently, can I get away with using the hyphenated form as a stylistic choice?
My feeling is that if “middle-schooler” is allowed, then “high-schooler” should be just as permissible. After all, someday I might have to type something about a “high high schooler”, and I’ll wish I had been using the hyphenated form all along.
I ran an NGRAM of high schooler, high-schooler, highschooler, high school student, and high-school student.
Click here to see the results.
By far the preferred nomenclature was high school student. High schooler was a distant third, and high-schooler barely mapped. This result was surprising given the rule of hyphenating compound adjectives, but I guess that high school without a hyphen is a standard morphology.
Correct answer by David M on February 12, 2021
I'm a junior-high school English teacher, and offer my experience at English grammar. High school (no dash) is proper if used alone, such as "I went to high school." However, use a dash if a noun follows the word school, as in "a high-school boy." Otherwise, it would read, "a high school boy" and would imply that you are talking about a schoolboy who happens to be high (stoned)! I hope this clears it up.
Oh, one more thing! Always use a comma before the last item in a list, as in red, green, and yellow peppers. That makes it clear you have red peppers, green peppers, and yellow peppers. Without that final comma the sentence reads differently: ("red, green and yellow peppers"), and one might assume that you have red peppers plus some peppers that are green-and-yellow (a pepper that has both green and yellow colors in it).
Write on...! :)
Answered by Mr. Laudahl on February 12, 2021
Get help from others!
Recent Questions
Recent Answers
© 2024 TransWikia.com. All rights reserved. Sites we Love: PCI Database, UKBizDB, Menu Kuliner, Sharing RPP