“But not everyone prefers to hyphenate...”

January 16, 2016 2:33 PM

Why Does Moby-Dick (Sometimes) Have a Hyphen? [The Smithsonian]

When the book was published in England, it bore that straightforward title. In a historical note to a scholarly edition of the book, Melville scholar G. Thomas Tanselle writes that Melville’s brother, Allan, made a last-minute change to the title of the American edition. “[Melville] has determined upon a new title,” his brother wrote. “It is thought here that the new title will be a better selling title…Moby-Dick is a legitimate title for the book.” The American edition went to press, hyphen intact, despite the fact that the whale within was only referred to with a hyphen one time. Hyphenated titles would have been familiar to Victorian-era readers, who were used to “fairy-tales” and “year-books.” Even Melville enjoyed a good hyphen now and then, as the title of his book White-Jacket proves. But it’s still unclear whether Melville, who didn’t use a hyphen inside the book, chose a hyphen for the book’s title or whether his brother punctuated the title incorrectly.

posted by Fizz (46 comments total)

$5 says the typesetter ran out of spaces.
posted by GuyZero at 2:38 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

Melville spends hundreds of pages detailing the intricacies of whale hunting, but never once tells us which leg Ahab is missing. Inconsistent hyphenation is no surprise.
posted by Ian A.T. at 2:50 PM on January 16, 2016 [24 favorites]

You guys don't get it. Moby-Dick is a double-barreled surname. The whale's given name?

dun

dun

DUUUUUNNNNN!!!

Ishmael.

(HE WAS ON THE BOAT THE WHOLE TIME)
posted by Sys Rq at 2:56 PM on January 16, 2016 [18 favorites]

"Reader, I hyphen-ated him."
posted by tilde at 3:01 PM on January 16, 2016 [11 favorites]

Sounds like the title on the cover was a bit dashed off.
posted by anothermug at 3:06 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

bean-plate
posted by HuronBob at 3:07 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

I always just viewed this as a "Victorians sure loved their extraneous punctuation" thing.
posted by town of cats at 3:11 PM on January 16, 2016

Thing are never clear with Melville. If he'd wanted to write a one-sided book, it should have been called Mobius Dick.
posted by ubiquity at 3:22 PM on January 16, 2016 [11 favorites]

Whenever I see hyphen-related issues, I just blame Terry-Thomas and Ann-Margret.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:33 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]

I always just viewed this as a "Victorians sure loved their extraneous punctuation" thing.

How can one not? Surely an orangutan is nowhere near as fascinating as an ourang-outang. Extravagant punctuation (along with fantastic middle names*) is what I envy most about the 19th century.

*Isambard Kingdom Brunel, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Greenleaf Whittier
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:39 PM on January 16, 2016 [13 favorites]

I hadn't known that the whale had a high fin.
posted by Elmore at 4:39 PM on January 16, 2016 [5 favorites]

It was just a fluke.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:43 PM on January 16, 2016 [12 favorites]

Periods (full-stops) have rules. So do semicolons. So so colons, kind of. Commas, not so much. Em dashes, not considered proper a few decades ago are all over the place now in the New Yorker and elsewhere, paired and not. Hyphens have always been a mine-field...although, strangely, the grammatical prescriptivists haven't been overly concerned about this punctuation mark. Which is fine. Who cares?

By the way, E.E. Cummings, in correspondence, did not sign his name without caps. So there.
posted by kozad at 5:22 PM on January 16, 2016

Metafilter's own! *raises hand*
posted by mynameisluka at 6:29 PM on January 16, 2016 [19 favorites]

To find your Victorian Middle Name, you take the first word of the last movie or television show you watched + the last fruit or vegetable you ate

I got "Masterfig"
posted by oulipian at 8:09 PM on January 16, 2016 [6 favorites]

I always thought that the whale must've eaten it.
posted by newdaddy at 9:09 PM on January 16, 2016

your Victorian Middle Name

By those rules, I'm "Greatraisin" or "Greatsultana" depending on your preferred fruit naming convention.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:36 PM on January 16, 2016

Gotham-Kale.
posted by parki at 9:41 PM on January 16, 2016

"Veratomato" doesn't really have the right ring to it, does it?

(Maybe "Vera-Tomato"? hmmm…)
posted by Pinback at 10:44 PM on January 16, 2016

Gilmoreapple, which sorta works!
posted by mollymayhem at 10:56 PM on January 16, 2016

the last fruit or vegetable you ate

what kind of prodigious memory are we supposed to have
posted by sylvanshine at 11:10 PM on January 16, 2016 [7 favorites]

To find your Victorian Middle Name, you take the first word of the last movie or television show you watched + the last fruit or vegetable you ate


Jonesspinach? Ugh.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:27 PM on January 16, 2016

Mozartpizza

Inconsistent punctuation is a thing - look at Qweeqweg's signature (I've Maltese crosses to the symbol for infinity ) or chapter 79 which is either "the Praire" or "the Prairie" depending on your edition.
posted by From Bklyn at 12:00 AM on January 17, 2016

Sensesprout

I like it
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:50 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Howl'smovingcastlegreens.

Hmm.
posted by minsies at 12:51 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

US and English (UK) hyphenation rules are different, which leads me to surmise (without actually bothering to research the fact) that their respective publication industries diverged before the widespread adoption of movable type (or at least fully justified text).

Particularly offensive to me is when hyphenations in the original scanned (or electronically sourced) documents for the purpose of breaking text across lines are included in Kindle versions and hence show up mid-line.
posted by oheso at 1:37 AM on January 17, 2016

To find your Victorian Middle Name, you take the first word of the last movie or television show you watched + the last fruit or vegetable you ate

So that would be Big Bang Theory and a banana. I like it!
posted by Paul Slade at 1:55 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

There has to be a better Victorian Middle Name rubric. I get Leaguebanana, which...

I have long noticed the hyphen thing in Moby-Dick (I have always used the hyphen for the name of the book, imagining it to be more correct by virtue of seeming less likely than the Moby Dick), and so I found this interesting. I am now hyphen-agnostic so far as the title of this book goes.

Last year, I did a small reading challenge, taking on three books I'd always wanted to read but been somewhat daunted by. I read Middlemarch, Infinite Jest, and Moby-Dick. That project was so successful I went on to read Ulysses. And then I somehow discovered M/M romance novels and that was the end of that.

I had never known what a funny book Moby-Dick was. People never tell you this about great literature. I was an English major and went to grad school in English Literature, and we never really focused on that. If I were teaching English, I'd do a class on it. We'd read Pride & Prejudice, Hamlet (we'd watch the David Tennant version because it does such a wonderful job bringing out the humor of the play), Moby-Dick excerpts.

I was inspired by the FPP about the new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables to re-read the book last night, for the first time since I was a girl. I always knew it was funny, what with things like the liniment cake and the raspberry cordial, but as a kid I didn't appreciate the relatively dry wit of the narration:

"Well, they didn't pick you for your looks, that's sure and certain," was Mrs. Rachel Lynde's emphatic comment. Mrs. Rachel was one of those delightful and popular people who pride themselves on speaking their mind without fear or favor.

And:

"Well, I hope it will turn out all right," said Mrs. Rachel in a tone that plainly indicated her painful doubts. "Only don't say I didn't warn you if he burns Green Gables down or puts strychnine in the well--I heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies. Only, it was a girl in that instance."

"Well, we're not getting a girl," said Marilla, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment and not to be dreaded in the case of a boy.

Of the Epic And Challenging Books I read in my little self-challenge, Moby-Dick is the only one I look forward do reading again, and I expect I'll do it fairly soon.
posted by not that girl at 5:12 AM on January 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

Youngbeet.
posted by datawrangler at 6:50 AM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Moby, the dick.
posted by Termite at 6:54 AM on January 17, 2016

BLADEORANGE.

I am currently re-reading Moby Dick, having first read it about ten years ago, and I will also vouch that it is pretty dryly funny! Though the prose seems to get a lot less funny, and a lot more pseudo-Shakespearian, once the Pequod sets sail. The tone of this book really does vary crazily.
posted by zchyrs at 6:56 AM on January 17, 2016

I changed my middle name because nobody could say Starstrawberry Straight without giving their tongue a Charley horse.
posted by straight at 8:35 AM on January 17, 2016

Meanwhile, legions of junior high school boys are like, "Who cares if there's a hyphen? Have you seen the second half of the title? [/snicker]"
posted by jonp72 at 8:48 AM on January 17, 2016

I wish it had stayed The Whale. The novel is so much more about the platonic Whale and how the physical size, mystery, and economic impact of the animal transcend its mere animal whaleness than about Moby Dick the whale.
posted by Makwa at 10:16 AM on January 17, 2016

I can't tell if Americanmango is a great name or if it just smacks of Chris Kattan
posted by Spatch at 11:08 AM on January 17, 2016

bean-plate

The legitimate title is Meta-Filter; Or, The Bean-Plate.
posted by mubba at 1:14 PM on January 17, 2016 [3 favorites]

Last year, I did a small reading challenge, taking on three books I'd always wanted to read but been somewhat daunted by. I read Middlemarch, Infinite Jest, and Moby-Dick. That project was so successful I went on to read Ulysses. And then I somehow discovered M/M romance novels and that was the end of that.

M/M romance novels... Middlemarch/Moby-Dick... romance... novels...?
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:44 PM on January 17, 2016

Multilevel Marketing. You know, like hot Amway stories...
posted by Cookiebastard at 3:04 PM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I hated Moby Dick. I haven't read it since HS, but I don't recall a shred of empathy or compassion for the whales -- in fact, only Ahab is even willing to grant them anything like will or agency, and Melville treats that as the very axis of his insanity.

I'd see the whole whale oil -> rock oil -> global warming -> human population crash thing as just deserts except that we'll be taking so much of the rest of the living world down with us -- including the whales.
posted by jamjam at 4:10 PM on January 17, 2016

I'd see the whole whale oil -> rock oil -> global warming -> human population crash thing as just deserts

Mostly oceans, actually.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:27 PM on January 17, 2016

jamjam, the chapters about whales contain a fair amount of reverence and awe of whales, as well as a fair bit of criticism about the near total ignorance the scientific community had about the lives of whales. Also, it's a very symbolic book, so that the only survivors are Moby Dick himself and Ishmael (who is far and away the worst whaler on board), is probably not a coincidence.
posted by Meeks Ormand at 4:52 PM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dude, spoiler alert!
posted by mpark at 5:45 PM on January 17, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure it is, after all it's telegraphed pretty early (arguably in the first chapter), and hinted at through out the whole book. In fact, I'm not sure it's possible to spoil Moby-Dick, in fact, the more I think about this the more I suspect that the more spoiled you are going in, the more you are likely to enjoy the book. After all, if you going in expecting a whaling adventure story you are going to have such a bad time (and it's dismal first run sales and poor initial reviews seem to back this up). Now I really want to reread it, and my last read was just in October...
posted by Meeks Ormand at 7:31 PM on January 17, 2016

Moby Dick is actually a hilarious and insane and great book, hyphen or no. The big secret is Melville wrote it under crazy pressure and half way through he realized he was in some kind of love with Hawthorne and decided to show him what he had. Hawthorne, kind of tragically, was squicked out and broke off their friendship after the book was published. I think Melville didn't really survive this reversal.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:28 PM on January 17, 2016

Shaftpersimmon.
posted by maxsparber at 5:23 AM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Midsomerkiwi.
posted by lkc at 11:53 AM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]