<UL TYPE=SQUARE>Quote: <span class="ev_code_blue">He called Mr. Beckham and his <I>team mates</I> "nancy boys."</span></UL>What struck me about this is that I would have written <I>teammates</I>. The author of the quoted passage is British (Quentin Letts), and I'm from the US. <BR><BR>Is this another transpondial difference? Which way do <I>you</I> spell it?I write "team mates" and I'm a Brit.I write "teammates" and I'm a USn.I write "teammates" and I'm a Brit.I write "team mates" and I'm a USn.

There is also the option "team-mates".

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".

As ever, what he said!

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.

Asa the clumsy

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.

I think of "pre-occupied" when I head for the toilets on airliners, which always have people in them. Or is that pee-occupied?

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.

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!

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.

Google seems to strip out punctuation from searches.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I tried to escape the punctuation by using a back-slash (\), but that didn't seem to work.

For example google "Mr\. Smith".

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.

I am much more intrigued by "nancy boys." What on earth are they?

Oh, silly me! I thought Hyphen was an Israeli seaport full of seven-headed sea monsters. Or do I have it confused with Haiphong?

No, you have Haiphong confused with diphthong.

Oh, Shu, a dipthong is the little piece of ribbon girls wear when they go swimming. Oy, don't you know ANYthing!?!?

quote:

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,

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.