by Jennie Ruby
My colleague was writing on his laptop across the room when
he asked "Is smackdown one word or two?"
Intrigued as to why a training professional
was writing about wrestling or extreme fighting, I walked over to take a look
at his document.
"Show me how you are using it," I said. "Are you using it as
a noun or a verb?"
"Why do you need to know how I'm using it? I just need to
know one word or two!"
The fact is, the way a word like smackdown is used in
a sentence determines whether it is one word or two. If the word is a verb, it is
two words for sure: "The basketball player may smack down the opposing player's
shot." However, my colleague was using it as a noun.
For smackdown as a noun, there were still two possibilities:
it could be one word, or it could be a hyphenated compound noun.
I asked my
colleague to open a browser and go to m-w.com. That is the Merriam-Webster
dictionary page, where you can instantly search for any word. Even so, I was a
little surprised that this fairly new, somewhat informal word was in there:
smackdown. Noun. 1997.
With that authoritative answer, my colleague right-clicked the
red-underlined word and chose "ignore" to Microsoft's suggested two-word
spelling.
In general, smack down, count down, clean up, and
smash up are used as two words when they are verbs, and one word when they are
nouns: smackdown, countdown, cleanup, smashup. However, sometimes the noun form
is hyphenated, as with follow up/follow-up. With a quick dictionary checkup,
you are good to go.
So why was a training professional writing about a
smackdown? As a vivid way to describe competing training programs. It worked!
***
About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007"
to her credit. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years
of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
Jennie teaches two classes popular online classes: Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts and Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts.