Most people who know me, know that I’m one of those annoyingly pedantic people who has to work really, really, hard NOT to point out every misused or absent apostrophe, misplaced hyphen, misspelt word, and...
Well, enough to say that I’m particular about punctuation and, after so many years in the writing world, I believe that it’s possible to tell the age and nationality of most people simply by the way they use it, especially commas and hyphens. Which is why I’m in such a quandary about the word - or words - house-sitting.
I can remember three years ago when we started out on this journey that I was stuck with the same dilemma. Is it house-sitting, housesitting or house sitting?
Obviously, way back then, I decided to opt for the hyphenated version. A choice most likely due to my traditional English education. Plus the fact that housesitting was too long and new to be acceptable without a hyphen, while house sitting was too new a word to be split in half, risking the chance that readers didn’t know that the words were invisibly joined.
But now, things seem to have changed. Not so much with my logic, but with technology, keyword searches, and laziness, I expect. After all, if you have the choice of typing the word into your phone with or without a space against having to click to another screen to find the necessary hyphen, which are you going to pick?
I can see the reason for and against each spelling. But what really concerns me is, is my original, hyphenated spelling old-fashioned and due to become dated? Should I be ready for it to threaten the chances of my house-sitting courses, sites, articles, and such, being found online, because search engines won’t pick up the spelling? Perhaps I should even consider taking the hyphen out of everything I've created before there’s too big a pile of things to alter.
So I’m genuinely interested, what’s your thought?
One word?
Two words?
One word with hyphen?
Or couldn’t give a …?
I’d love to know.
I’d love to know.
