hush-OG vs Hus-HOG

Robert Borski · 04 Dec 2000, 10:48 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "Robert Borski" <rborski at charter.net>
Subject: (whorl) Re: hush-OG vs Hus-HOG
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 10:48:45
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0042 at digest.urth.net>
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Rostrum having weighed the evidence and decided:

<"hush.og"?  Looks like a website for librarians.  I suppose that's
supposed to say "hush og"?  And I guess you mean that the orignial word
was 'hushog' (one 'h' in the middle) pronounced "hus hog"?  Took me a
minute to figure that out - more confusing than the Matera Mint typo in
Exodus.>

Sorry for the confusion. The dot between hush and og was supposed to be up
higher, on the same level as a hyphen, the way it's done in dictionaries,
but apparently current web standards do not support all of the alternates in
the Windows character map. (It also bothers me you can't italicize or
underline words in forums like this.) Wolfe's letter had the dot, and it
appeared in the proper place when I typed the e-mail, but when I sent it
whorlward, it wound up dropped down like a period.

As you point out, I also put in one too many 'h's in 'hushhog,' there being
only two altogether, one at the beginning, one in the middle.

Perhaps I should have written it as you did: hush og vs hus hog. Or: hush-og
and hus-hog. At any rate the original word was hus plus hog, but apparently
GW feared people like me would see it as hush+og and try to make a case for
a Tolkein influence (ladies and gents, I give you Hushog, brother of
Balrog).

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out the potential connection between
the second syllable of hushog and the soon-to-be-met Pig.

Robert Borski

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