Doesn’t this imply that he defiles orcs from Moria? There are others that war with orcs from Moria, skirmish with them, sap them… Orc syrup?
: Zubon
10 thoughts on “Hyphen Usage”
Comments are closed.
Doesn’t this imply that he defiles orcs from Moria? There are others that war with orcs from Moria, skirmish with them, sap them… Orc syrup?
: Zubon
Comments are closed.
That’s precisely what it implies. You *really* don’t want to know the details. (On a related note – Beater and Biter? Not swords, that was a translation error. Again, the specifics are very NSFW.)
there’s the funny response so I’ll give the /nerdhat one.
And as a langui-phile* shame on you for not picking this up already!
He’s not an orc defiler, he’s an orc-defiler. ;-} An orc who does defile! Though that does not preclude him from defiling orcs.
*(yes I made that up, have fun!)
(as so often happens, I had a point that I utterly failed to convey here. hopefully made up for it a little below.)
I guess you would have a field day with the German translation if you find that already funny… :)
My first impression was that yes, “orc-defiler” does, quite specifically, mean “one who defiles orcs”. Having read the usage outline for the hyphen at
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/punctuationhyphen/hyphen-
however, I am not so sure. I don’t think it’s clear either way.
If I was writing a story in which there was a character who was an orc who defiled things (god forbid) and I was insane enough to try and construct a generic term for him, I think I’d go for “orcish defiler”, although that risks him being thought of as a defiler who’s a bit like, but not actually, an orc. I definitely wouldn’t go for the hyphenate, though.
Well IIRC Tolkien does specifically have the habit of using “Thing-” as a direct substitute for where we’d use “Thingish” or i.e. “having origin among the Things”.
I still can’t reconcile that with Zub’s warg-riders example, so it looks like he did catch Turbine in an inconsistency there.
There are also Moria Warg-riders. These are riders of Moria wargs, not Moria wargs that ride [something].
A Moria orc-defiler would indeed be a defiler of orcs, by my reading, and not an orc who defiles generally. However he could be a defiler of orcs who just happens to live in Moria – he shouldn’t have to restrict himself to just defiling Moria orcs.
Considering that the defiler’s role is to give other orcs and bad guys green morale luvving, maybe it -is- aptly hyphenated…
Confusion stems form the fact that there’s no established adjectival form of Moria (that I’m aware of. If we could say ‘Morian Orc-defiler’ instead, it would go a lot easier.