Varied Meanings
Some strong examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens:
- Disease-causing poor nutrition, meaning poor nutrition that causes disease
- Disease causing poor nutrition, meaning a disease that causes poor nutrition
- A man-eating shark is a shark that eats humans.
- A man eating shark is a man who is eating shark meat.
- A blue-green sea is a sea whose color is somewhere between blue and green.
- A blue green sea is a contradiction, unless "blue" or "green" are used contextually to mean something other than a color.
- Three-hundred-year-old trees are an indeterminate number of trees that are 300 years old.
- Three hundred-year-old trees are three trees that are 100 years old.
- Three hundred year-old trees are 300 trees that are 1 year old.
Read more about this topic: Hyphen
Famous quotes containing the words varied and/or meanings:
“Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm?—the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)