I've voted for "team mates", but I suspect I might use "team-mates". I think it's more a matter of individual style. This is similar to the usual progression as in "store front" > "store-front" > "storefront".
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I write none of the above, as I've never been chosen for a team, but hyphenation makes sense to me. It's like "coworker" instead of "co-worker." In some parts of this country you'd get arrested for orking cows.
Having introduced the hyphen into this discussion I'll proceed to take the thread further off-topic.
My newspaper contained the word "pre-occupied", which I can only assume is an error. To me, it would mean "occupied before", not "lost in thought". I see, however, that "occupied before" is a secondary meaning of "preoccupied". I would use "pre-occupied" in a sentence like When we moved into our new home we discovered it had been pre-occupied by a family of rats.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Another instance is re-mark, which we use at work quite often when a school queries the exam results of pupils and asks for their papers to be marked again. I have seen it spelt remark, which is not only incorrect, in my view, but also potentially confusing.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I suspect I need some help in searching Google. A search for "teammate" gave around 13,900,000 Ghits; one for "team-mate" about 2,790,000; whereas "team mate" reported 2,810,000. However, a cursory look through the results for team mate gave several hits for team-mate. Is there any way of filtering out the hyphen? Since the "-" character is used as a search command itself, you can't very well exclude it!
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I suspect that Google treats team mates and team-mates as identical (the difference in ghits being due to approximation). You see that if you add other terms to reduce the sheer number of ghits. A search for "team-mate" androgynous yields identical numbers of ghits with and without the hyphen.
I googled up google punctuation and found that Google recognizes non-letter characters in some special combinations (C++; $10), and it will recognize the apostrophe, but that's it. There is no general way to force Google to recognize non-letter characters.
Hyphens are a special case. A search with a hyphen, such as team-work, will return matches for team-work, team work and teamwork.
Originally posted by Kalleh: I am much more intrigued by "nancy boys." What on earth are they?
It's a slightly dated insult calling someone effeminate or homosexual. You still see or hear it occasionally.This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Samuel Johnson.
I'm a bit younger, so I'll say is very dated. It sounds to me like it would be used in the 50s. I have heard it a bunch of times, but I can't put my finger on any of the contexts.
First of all, I can't believe you've heard it. I haven't, and I am "a bit" older than you are. Though I do suspect that men talk about this subject more than women do.
Well, I've heard nancy boy used by both straight and gay men in speech, but as an archaism. I've heard it movies and read it in literature. I don't think it's rare, just a bit old fashioned.
