First Readers (Beta Readers) discussion

I just finished reading O. Henry's story "The Missing Chord." It was okay. As usual with O., he went for the joke format, the punchline at the end, the traditional sequential telling of the tale, the moral heavy handedness, &c. No surprise there.

What did surprise me though was his use of separated contractions using the word "not." For instance, these occur in the story throughout:


could n't
would n't
should n't
has n't
was n't


This caught my eye. I don't remember ever having seen the root word of the contraction phrase separated by a space from the contracted form of "not."

It reminded me of the way words start out sometimes as hyphenated creatures, then, eventually, as they evolve over generations, lose their hyphen entirely. Of course, a lot of times this doesn't take generations. Maybe it only takes a few years. Take the word email, for instance. That started off as "e-mail" not generations ago but in 1982, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. [On second thought, I guess 1982 may have been one generation ago -- but just one!]

So, once done with the story, I decided to look around a little online and found an interesting article on contractions at Grammar Girl's great site. Here's a short quote:

Unfortunately, the Coen brothers were misinformed. Mark Liberman of the linguistics blog Language Log found that the original True Grit novel by Charles Portis contained both contracted and uncontracted forms. For comparison, however, Liberman looked at two other novels, including Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, and found that those novels were more likely to include contractions than True Grit, so there really is some contraction avoidance in the novel True Grit. Maybe Portis wrote that way for purposes of characterization, Liberman suggests. He also quoted a paper in the Journal of English Linguistics on the history of contractions with “not.” It said that they first appeared in writing at the beginning of the 17th century, increased during the 18th, and were more or less accepted in the 19th.

In fact, there were even contractions before the 1600s, but at that time they usually weren’t indicated with an apostrophe, because the apostrophe was still a recent invention. Going back more than a thousand years, Old English had a class of contracted verbs. For example, the verb seon, “to see,” was a contraction of the earlier seohan. So contractions are not a recent development in English.

I started to look for Twain's famous book online but, before I did, I searched for a copy of O. Henry's short story online so you could see for yourself what I'm talking about. Of course, this is where I ran into the revisionist history of teh interwebs. Take a look at this and you'll see what I mean:

Teh Interweb's Version of O. Henry's They Missing Chord

So they're all gone. All the contractions are converted (in this version at least) to the modern type, sans the space.

Off to the library now to try and find an old copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hopefully, I can find one that illustrates just how Twain's contractions appeared in the original -- and not how some new generation of typesetters decided they should look.

That's very interesting - I don't (do n't) remember ever seeing that before. However, spell-check is NOT correcting it!

lol You do n't sayyy?