Greetings! Today I'd like to start with a task that consumes a great deal of time for copy editors: deciding whether a compound is one word, two words or hyphenated.

A decade and a half ago in "Lapsing Into a Comma," I wrote, with perhaps less sensitivity than I'd exhibit today:

If there’s one thing the average civilian will screw up more often than not, it’s the distinction between one word and two. One of my guilty pleasures on the Web is reading Las Vegas trip reports. Several sites publish gambling pilgrims’ minute-by-minute diaries, and you can be sure they’ll contain sentences like “I wanted to get me some primerib, but they says there ain’t no bare foot people allowed in the buffetline.”

The writers and editors at The Washington Post are not average civilians, of course, but we still struggle. Dictionaries and stylebooks differ, and in cases less obvious than barefoot and prime rib and buffet line, the decision is often arbitrary. We choose cabdriver over cab driver not because it makes any particular sense, but because that's what the dictionary says and we want to be consistent.

Reading a Post blog entry online one morning, I saw a couple of egregious examples of smushedtogether onewording, and so I decided to start a compilation of such errors in the online stylebook. I figured it would consist mainly of that class of error -- one word where it should have been two -- and indeed over the weeks I've collected a fair number of those. Punchline, floorplan, railcar, dataset, wildcard, webfeed, pitbull. All should be two words.

The big surprise, however, was that far more often people write two words where our stylebook or dictionary calls for one. Fist fight, tea house, shanty town, master stroke, boom box, snow fall, time line, school work, stop light, snow plow, pink eye, fire truck, tree house, meal time, oil men, gun fight, ear muffs, guard house, home ownership, eye strain. All should be solid.

Is this a glamorous line of work or what? Now, what's on your mind?