.

When two nouns are jointly used, the first serving as a _qualifying_
adjective to the second, a hyphen should be inserted between them.
Writers and printers frequently omit the hyphen in such cases, causing
an unnecessary obscurity to the reader; thus, "Colonel Baden-Powell,
when in West Africa, fell in love with a native saying, 'Softly, softly:
catchee monkey!' which, when Anglicized, is, 'Don't flurry: patience
gains the day!'" I had some difficulty in understanding the meaning of
this pleasantry till I supplied the hyphen between the two words,
_native-saying_. When a compound title becomes very common, the two
words coalesce, as, _cornfield_, _farmyard_, _schoolhouse_, etc.

It is not uncommon to see the titles of books, especially in the
printed catalogues of our Public Libraries, begin with a small or
lower-case letter. This style is not only incorrect, but misleading,
and corrupting good taste, and should not be adopted by men of
letters. The reason given for it, namely, _ease in reading_, is very
weak and inadequate. The plea of "good usage," urged in many cases,
is not sufficient justification of any literary practice _in itself_
incorrect and vulgar.

When phonetic spelling and writing come to take the place of our present
or ideographic method, the difficulties of the proof-reader will be
greatly increased. To-day it would be a difficult matter for him to
spell the expression, "Uneeda Biscuit," or to decide the correct mode of
printing the word "coffee," which sometimes appears as _kaughphy_. It is
true that phonotypy would enable the child the more easily to master the
art of spelling; but whether words meaning the same thing would be
spelled alike by all writers is very questionable, as the most common
words are frequently mispronounced; as, _sech_ for _such_, _gud_ for
_good_, _git_ for _get_, _gut_ for _got_, etc.

With a few exceptions, the words of MS. books, to the 15th century,
run on continuously without spacing; and as to punctuation, little
or nothing was known. In the Greek works on papyrus before Christ,
there are to be found certain marks indicating pauses, such as the
wedge-shaped sign (>). In Biblical MSS., however, the division of the
text into lines enabled the reader the more easily to understand the
meaning, and was an assistance to him in public reading. As many
blunders were made by the monks in transcribing and re-transcribing the
ancient MSS., the assistance of the corrector, o