Danbooru

Alias Reversal: hairclip and hairpin

Posted under General

Both look better as one word to me. English has tons of two-morpheme non-spaced compound words: blackboard, cowboy, firetruck, policeman, hairline, paperclip, linchpin. I'd say both of these are fine and should be left as is.

"Hairpin" has 1764 results in the Corpus of Contemporary English, whereas "hair pin" has 5; that alias is fine. "Hairclip" has 6, whereas "hair clip" has 27, which is a small sample, but the trend is confirmed by Google hits; that alias needs reversed.

DschingisKhan said:
Reason: English is not German.

Oho, do I spy with my little eye a language peeve? The tendency for English is to drop spaces and hyphens and make compound words, over time; unsurprising, given that it's a Germanic language.

glasnost said:
Oho, do I spy with my little eye a language peeve?

In this case, more like laziness (and I think the German propensity for creating ludicrous compounds is hilarious). I tend get antsy over En -> Ja translation nuances more than the vagaries of Indo-European linguistic incest. (While Modern English is technically Germanic, they're still very distinct languages after a thousand years. It's a far cry from the family resemblance seen in Arabic and Farsi or Russian and Ukrainian.)

Anyway, while it's inconsistent and looks wrong to me (for whatever reason), I suppose I must concede hairpin.

DschingisKhan said:
It's a far cry from the family resemblance seen in Arabic and Farsi

That's interesting, because Farsi and Arabic are not at all in the same family. Farsi is Indo-European, while Arabic is Semitic. Just because Farsi is written using the (modified) Arabic script doesn't make it in any way related on the linguistic level.

葉月 said:
That's interesting, because Farsi and Arabic are not at all in the same family. Farsi is Indo-European, while Arabic is Semitic. Just because Farsi is written using the (modified) Arabic script doesn't make it in any way related on the linguistic level.

Maybe it wasn't Arabic. It's been a long time since my grandma was talking to our neighbours despite never having technically learned Farsi. There was a close relation in there somewhere. But yeah.

Leave them one word. For hairpin, because it's more common. For hairclip, partly because both are used, but more so because it's over 11k images and the alias will never work and we'll have people bumping this thread for six months saying it's repeatedly broken, like cap. Not the most intellectually sound reason, but sometimes technology trumps that. Especially if the potential benefit is purely cosmetic.

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