Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Question #5: Punctuation

Continuing our series of odd questions ... quick, is the following sentence correctly punctuated?

Come in and enjoy a home-style dinner with all the fixin's!

Definitive Answer from Casey:
"Though it looks wonky somehow, I think it is. "Home-style" is not in the dictionary, so it's hard to say if it should be a hyphenate, and though "fixin's" looking like an improperly placed possessive, it seems like a proper conjunction."

4 comments:

Casey. said...

Though it looks wonky somehow, I think it is. "Home-style" is not in the dictionary, so it's hard to say if it should be a hyphenate, and though "fixin's" looking like an improperly placed possessive, it seems like a proper conjunction.

There is a plague of bad menu editing here. I've taken to amusing myself (and others) with editing them as I go.

Matthew said...

I agree, and I also thought it was a rogue possessive at first.

I knew I could depend on you to answer this one! =)

Unknown said...

Looks right to me.

scoots said...

I believe you usually use the hypen like that when an adjective is attributive (typically, before the noun it describes) rather than a predicate adjective.

So for example, “That interview was hard hitting,” but “That was a hard-hitting interview.”