Calling all grammarians and spelling bee champions:
What is the correct spelling — or are there correct spellings:
Is it:
“Midcentury” … “mid-century” … or “mid century”?
As in (1): “midcentury modern sofa”, “mid-century modest house” or “mid century American history”. And would it change as in: (2) “in midcentury/mid-century/mid century America”.
Golly, over the past six+ years, we’ve spelled it every which way. Hey: Covering all our bases and google keywords, too, I guess. However, my Meade County High School English teacher Ivy B. Hawkins — a fantastic teacher who made us diagram sentences until we could do it in our sleep — would not be amused by this lax just get it onto the www who cares about spelling anymore 21st Century (21st-Century? 21st-century?) attitude of mine.
So which is it?
Finally, what exact parts of speech do you call the word/compound, in each usage? Ack! My brain explodes! As you respond, can you also provide your citations – add hotlink in your comment. Thank you!
Thanks, I’ll check that out!
And there’s also mid’-century, with a apostrophe to indicate that mid is a contraction of middle. Of course nobody uses this, so be bold! Be the first on your block to do so.
As with other compound adjectives, you’d use the hyphenated mid-century to describe a mid-century house, or mid-century modern style.
Technically, there is no mid century, since mid is not a word. As for midcentury, I don’t like it, it hasn’t had enough time to become standardized and easy to read (whereas unhappy has, along with whereas).
I can’t believe I missed this thread. I had some great laughs and groans while reading it. My, some people do take themselves quite seriously, don’t they.
As for me, I have seen the word spelled every way possible in books, trade publications, decorating magazines and on blogs and I have always understood the design, decor, style or look the author had in mind.
With so many opinions concerning which spelling is correct or incorrect, my suggestion is to spell the word exactly as you please and in someone’s quite educated opinion, you will always be correct.
BTW, that is, “by the way”, quotes or no quotes, I went back to visit a an article by Ellen Kate Taylor. She is a California-based (hyphen is correct because she wrote it that way) writer, home designer and web consultant specializing in interior design and design history.
At the bottom of her column, she says that mid-century, Midcentury. Mid-century and midcentury are all acceptable alternate spellings for the time, design and styles of the subject we all love to read about in retro renovation.
So, there is my two cents worth from someone who should know, so HAVE at it!
p.s. you can read her post at about.com under their “about home” section.
I’m just going to say “retro,” lol.
This is a great discussion – thanks for everyone’s ideas. But whoops, I don’t think “familiaritization” (7 lines above) is a word (and the red underline shows that spellcheck agrees with me! The correct word is “familiarization”.