Talk:Cat's-whisker detector

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[edit] Move

Suggest we move this to Cat Whisker Detector. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by JA.Davidson (talk • contribs).

You mean "Cat-whisker detector"? Dicklyon 05:15, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hyphenation

Are you sure about the hyphen in cat's-whisker. I understand the logic, but I don't recall ever seeing a hyphen with a possessive. Hyphens normally go between compound adjectives to avoid ambiguity. I guess there could be ambiguity: the cat's (whisker detector) or the (cat's whisker) detector. Still, I don't recall ever seeing this construction. SDC 05:07, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I checked first with Google Book Search. It is of course common for many books to omit the hyphen in such constructions, since book authors and editors aren't completely literate on the whole, but since a fair number of them did use the hyphen, and since many of the ones that did use the hyphen used quotation marks as in "cat's whister" detector, it seemed clear that there was a consensus that this was not to be written as a detector of cat's whishers as we had before (or was it a detector of whiskers, of by or for the cat?). I thought the conventional hyphen made more sense than putting quotation marks into the title. Dicklyon 05:13, 27 March 2007 (UTC)