Which Is Better -- "Pre-emption" or "Preemption"?
Of course, we all know that the best solution is preëmption, but I'm curious what people think about the other two options.
By the way, I'm pretty sure both are fully standard -- neither can be said to be "wrong" as a matter of standard English usage, though particular publications may have style manuals that insist on one or the other.
Of course this is only an issue the first time the word comes up, so it's probably not a huge deal.
One article (circa 1981) by Ira Lupu referred to Roe as preventing opponents of abortion from voting for "profile" candidates, which to my mind shows the value of the humble hyphen in avoiding typos.
The comparison with "cooperation" is interesting, because one sees that in books that came out around the time that "coöperation" was fading. Not that long ago. The umlaut was clealry there to indicate that the "oo" should not be read as a dipthong.
But "cooperate" is such a common word, and I suspect that this is why there is no longer a felt need to indicate the syllabification of "coop." Pre-empt is not written frequently enough in general usage to qualify. In a decade, perhaps, we'll see "preempt" take over. As of now, I write "pre-emption."
(Can we also anticipate that "preemptory" will take on the meaning of "peremptory," which will then fade from the language?)
So preemption, even though others don't like the double vowel. Written English doesn't normally use pronunciation hints (accents, graves, umlauts).
Unlike the more common evolution of noun conjunctions: "key stone" "key-stone" "keystone".
If you don't want to look too antebellum, I would suggest the hyphenated version.
"The umlaut would make sense in French where I believe it would indicate that the double vowel is two sounds, not a dipthong (which is what we want here), but is there any reasonably modern precedent for using that accent in English?"
The names of heavy metal bands?
And the Onion: "Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts"
Beyond that, nöt müch.
Of course, in this case, preempt appears as its own entry (not under pre-) in my dictionary. So I'd just go by that.
How about naïve? Or the name Chloë? Those two are off the top of my head.
Personally, I'd like to see more of it, like in coöperation. So, I guess count me in on the "preëmption" preference.
And in that situation it serves the useful purpose of indicating that the first two syllables are not "cooper" but "co-op."
So it's preemption (but use a dieresis if you're writing for the New Yorker!).
Yes. Yes, it does. Lord knows I don't want to confuse a word that means "working together" with the profession of barrel-making.
pre-emption is easier to read
Since I assume you are writing for the extreme priority the good looks, ditch the hyphen. You don't need to write child-safe law review articles.
I realize it is a different issue here, but the feeling bleeds over.
If I were writing a law review article, I'd eliminate the hyphen. It's a waste of pixels, and the oddity of a hyphenated word makes it pop a little from the page. As to pronunciation, anyone reading an article that discusses preemption can pronounce it without the hyphen.
Well-known Austrian philosopher.
"Words have a physiognomy.
Well-known Austrian philosopher."
OK. So either Wittgenstein or Schwarzenegger?
I write "pre-emption" when I'm a) sure my audience will have difficulty pronouncing it, b) writing to people who are used to British spellings (I also shamelessly add unnecessary "u" and "e" and even sometimes swap "z" and "s"), or c) feeling like being different. "Preemption" wins on legal blogs, when I'm lazy, or when the tyranny of Microsoft Word is more important than my audience's needs. "Cooperation" is pretty much universal... but I add extra hyphens whenever I can when commenting on the BBC website, and so it becomes "co-operation" there (I do the same thing with my 8-year-old Sunday School classes, who usually get bonus lessons in math and reading while studying scripture with me.)
Also: I have no objection to hyphens. My name is hyphenated, my first cousins' names are all hyphenated, and I went to elementary school with the son of this man, whose entire family is hyphenated. Embrace semi-exotic punctuation, that's what I say; I'm already typing hyphens every day anyhow.
Come here often? We live for this stuff.
I practice in an area that's been throwing the word around of late, and I've seen it both ways in opinions and briefs. My sense is that use of the hyphenated version is declining but is still used my a significant minority of practitioners and judges.
They use "preempt." That tends to support Hoosier's point that the value of hyphenating declines as the word becomes more familiar.
As a libertarian, I think non-intervention is best...
EV: "I was just joking about the dieresis"
No tyrannical implications. It's just that during the Boston Tea Party we accidentally threw several boxes of perfectly good hyphens overboard by mistake as well, and we've been short ever since.
That was worthy of late-80s Dave Barry. I congratulate you, sir/madame.
Sarah-- and I went to elementary school with the son of this man
I went to high school with this woman
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Phair
Which is irrelevant. But she's totally cool.
"this many posts" or "these many posts"?
"As many posts as are here posted by the posters of these posts. Here."
(I used to teach ESL!)
Besides, we don't write "red-emption," do we? ;-)
Touche.
(Or, as Webster commanded Americans to spell it - "Toche".)
It's the other guy. Aahnuld said:
In my view, prefixes that create double vowels at the junction should use a hyphen. Yes, that means I prefer co-operation to cooperation (which, at first glance, seems to refer to the action of a barrel maker).
By the same token, I think seeing "non" as a separate word is unusual, so I always hyphenate words like non-compete, etc.
Po-temkin.
I'll settle for neither, like Bush patently should have.
a) side walk, b) side-walk and c) sidewalk.
The reason is that it is incorrect to autohyphenate pre-emption when doing typesetting, so preemption is better (if it goes over the margins it can be hyphenated at pre-emption, preemp-tion, etc).
In response to LC Schreib's point, I would add though that a lot of compounds actually are inherited from Old English, where binary compounding was accepted and never hyphenated. Even in early middle English, we get compounds like Courtyard. (Note that Court comes from the Old French word which has the same meaning as yard does in Middle English, so it is a redundant compound....)