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:
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a college student, people wrote letters. The businessman who read, the lawyer who traveled; the dressmaker in evening school, my unhappy mother, our expectant neighbor: all conducted an often large and varied correspondence. It was the accustomed way of ordinarily educated people to occupy the world beyond their own small and immediate lives.”
—Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)
“Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)