Talk:Stepping-stone squeeze

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Contract bridge, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to bridge on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.

Surely stepping-stone should be hyphenated? It's a concatenation of two words. Cambion 11:20, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I think so too. Steppingstone is plain ugly. I think I have Reese's book in question, so I can check, but I think I would have noticed if he spelled it differently. Duja 15:41, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

I may have to bow to majority opinion. Unfortunately, my copy of Master Play, aka The Expert Game, fell apart years ago, so I didn't check that, but the Official Encyclopedia and the Bridge World Glossary both use Steppingstone. So does my Random House Unabridged Dictionary. My OED gives stepping-stone. I agree that "steppingstone" is ugly, and I wonder if this might be a British spelling vs. American spelling issue. (BTW, "concatenation" and "hyphenated.") Xlmvp 03:39, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I checked the book, Reese uses "stepping-stone" throughout. Duja 08:03, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Okay, "stepping-stone" it is. Winston Churchill wrote, "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided wherever possible." However, Churchill was known to be a rotten bridge player, so let's use the hyphen. I have rephrased the derivation of "stepping-stone" in part to avoid "metaphor," which I thought needed more explanatory verbiage. BTW, in English, the word "metaphor" drops the final "e" in contrast to, e.g., "gonophore." Xlmvp 14:28, 14 July 2006 (UTC)