Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Blogging from A to Z - today's words are hyphen and HAAP Ibn Farrago

Welcome to the letter H! First I'm going to discuss the hyphen and when to insert it between words. The simplest situation is compound words used as an adjective before a noun.

An example you'll see often is "crude-oil-processing plant". You can't equally call it a crude plant or an oil plant, so these are not coordinate adjectives (see April 3rd's post).

An example from my MG manuscript MIGHTY MIKE AND THE INTERGALACTIC CANDY DISPENSER comes on the first page. "According to The List of Chumps to be Pounded After School, today was hang-Mike-like-a-piƱata Wednesday." None of those words describe Wednesday alone.

These combinations can be made with several word forms - nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and heck throw a conjunction in the mix too! I could give examples all day. Instead, comment on your favorite or most confusing hyphenated adjective and I'll get on to more fun stuff.

This is HAAP Ibn Farrago, a sabino Arabian stallion. His nickname was Max and we were lucky enough to own him for 4 years. He came to us as a difficult-to-handle (ooh, another example) stallion that didn't know how to behave properly around other horses and was barely ride-able.

Sabino is a gene that gives horses "color", like tobiano and overo which most people associate with Paints. Sabinos usually have more white on their faces and legs, with kind of a lacy pattern at the edges. Max was considered a minimal sabino.

Max is also the sire of the filly Daught, pictured along with her mom Ginger yesterday. Now she got some crazy coloring!

He had some amazing babies and became a solid endurance horse although I left it up to my husband to handle him at competitions. Sadly, we lost him to a severe colic. We still have his second-to-last (omg, they're everywhere!) daughter, the filly Csavannah, pictured on April 3rd's post.

R.I.P. Max, we miss you.

7 comments:

  1. Sorry to hear about Max... Beautiful pics!
    Shawn from Laughing at Life 2

    ReplyDelete
  2. Max was a beautiful creature. I'm glad you still have a filly of his to keep his legacy going.

    Elsie
    AJ's wHooligan in the A-Z Challenge

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I probably won't ever breed her but she is certainly an amazing girl. She definitely inherited his calm demeanor (in most circumstances) and flashy attitude.

      Delete
  3. aw, such a magnificent animal. i'm glad there are progeny to continue his line.

    thank you for the hyphen lesson. i knew that you were supposed to hyphen because my microsoft kept yelling at me, but know i know the reason why.

    ReplyDelete
  4. wonderful gorgeous horse! but more importantly I learned something today! Thanks for that Teresa visiting from the following sitesFangirl Next Door, Quackin Over Disney, Stormy's Sidekick Geek On!

    ReplyDelete
  5. He really was a beauty. I'm sorry you lost him. :( And that line from your WIP is great! Love it!

    Alex Hurst, fantasy author in Japan, participating in Blogging A-Z April Challenge.

    ReplyDelete