Romney Camp's Hyphen in 'Sneak-Peak'

 

Recently, I and about six million other schadenfreude-fueled  bloggers snickered at the Mitt Romney camp’s publishing a Facebook promo with  the term “sneak-peak” instead of “sneak peek.” I warn careful writers about this peak-vs.-peek danger a lot, so the campaign’s error was a good reminder  that, unless you’re talking about stolen hallucinogenic drugs, the thing you’re  sneaking is probably a “peek.”

 

But another interesting fact about the typo got less  attention is that hyphen. Even if they had gotten the peek part right, why did they think it contained a hyphen?

 

We may never know, but the one thing we can be sure of is that a lot of people – even people who know how to hyphenate compound modifiers like “smooth-running” or “well-paying” – have no idea when to put a hyphen in  terms functioning as nouns or verbs. That’s because no one ever tells us that  the answer is right at our fingertips, no farther than your nearest dictionary or dictionary site.

 

My favorite example: type “water ski” into Webster’s New World College Dictionary online at yourdictionary.com and you’ll see that the piece of equipment is called a water ski, but the verb is water-ski. The person  doing the water-skiing is a water-skier.

 

Two out of three are hyphenated, but one isn’t. No formula will help you figure out which. You just have to look it up.

 

So did the Romney team confirm their hyphen in “sneak-peak”?
Considering they got peek wrong, it won’t surprise you that they were none too meticulous in researching that hyphen, either. Webster’s New World doesn’t have a listing for “sneak peek” or “sneak-peek,” which means there is no such  hyphenated word. Instead, “sneak peek” is a combo you form yourself with two distinct words. And because hyphenation rules don’t apply to noun phrases, this takes no hyphen.

 

Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage agree. Hopefully next time, one of the professional communicators on the Romney team will sneak a peek at a dictionary before embarrassing the candidate and themselves.

Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2012 at 2:56 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.