The years of UCal budget cuts are working! ("sign-up")

[Brian Hitchcock]

Finally, someone (a UCLA alumnus or alumna, no doubt) dared to conjugate
the faux verb sign-up,  exactly as one logically would if it were a verb,
without noticing the absurdity thereof! As an expatriate Western
Washingtonian, working in semi-literate Southern California, I often find
it necessary to use this reductio ad absurdum technique of conjugating the
alleged verb to demonstrate to native Californians that such bogus yet
ubiquitous verbs as ~to sign-up~ or ~to log-in~ (or their equally
ubiquitous non-hyphenated step-siblings  ~to shutdown~, ~to lookup~, ~to
rollover~ etc.) are not actually verbs, and thus are not conjugated as a
unit.  For example, I try to point out to them the absurdity of saying : I
have sign-upped; I was loginning; I shutdowned my computer;  I lookupped
the definition.  This usually works.



Apparently no out-of-stater has ever pointed out this anomaly to the UCLA
Alumni Association; or if so, it went right past them; however, in
Southern California, it is increasingly common to see the verb form of
such verb/adverb constructs rendered WITH a hyphen  (Please Sign-up Here),
and the related noun form rendered WITHOUT a hyphen (The sign up process
is easy.)  This occurs both in private and in public. I see it almost
daily in business memos; in addition, I see it frequently on service
trucks  (Free Haul Away, Same Day Pick Up) and even on some billboards. I
think it's because once a person becomes convinced that the verb form is
rendered in consolidated (signup) or hyphenated (sign-up) fashion, he or
she HAS TO  render the noun form DIFFERENTLY, usually as separate words
(sign up) to distinguish it! So it seems that most Southern Californians
know that there are different usages, and that there is some sort of rule
about hyphen usage in these verbal forms, and most of them consistently
apply that rule BACKWARDS.



I doubt whether a restored budget at the college would do anything to
minimize such usage errors by alumni association; these associations are
generally staffed by volunteers, most have no paid editor.  And judging by
what passes for English usage in the public sphere in California, I would
not be surprised if better funding for the colleges might just result in
hiring more native Californian English teachers who cannot properly
recognize and distinguish verb/adverb combinations used as nouns from
those used as verbs (let alone those used as adjectives!), cannot render
each appropriately, and thus could not explain the distinction to
students.  (But I never took any college English classes, so maybe I
shouldn't make inferences as to what does or does not happen there.)



But from where I stand, it seems that the blind are leading the blind - I
must admit that, with the exception of you few brave souls, I feel I am
virtually alone in a wilderness of seemingly-willful ignorance.



BWH

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