Just quickly, does anyone know which one is correct/why they are different?? I know that it's definitely "I have to thank you for the Christmas present", not "I have to thankyou", but are there any more distinctions?? Just wondering... ta!
Thankyou as one word is an alternative to thanks as a noun. "Many thanks for all the kinds words." "I must make sure to send out my thankyous lest I be seen as ungrateful." It's a bit of a neologism and is not recognized by my spellcheck, though I have found enough references on the web to give the word credibility.
i don't think seeing it often on the web is enough to give it a pass with agents/editors/publishers... at least i hope it isn't!
The complete Oxford English Dictionary doesn't list "thankyou" at all (and my spelling checker objects to it). The OED does contain a citation for "thankyou" from the Westminster Gazette of 1894, so it's not that much of a neologism.
if put together, it would need a hyphen to make sense and not look like a typo, which is what cramming the words together does...
I'm not opposed to cramming words together if it works for the character's voice, but "thankyou" looks and sounds odd to me. The hard K sort of puts a wall up between the two syllables. A hyphen would read a lot better to me. Hmm - maybe "thanque"? No - that just looks weird, even for a character with a rapid fire accent. Well, I'll personally just wait and see if the new use takes hold. Just from an aesthetic view, though, it'll have an uphill battle. -Frank
I suspect it will happen, but possibly not in my lifetime. It's an established progression in language development. Two words commonly used together start getting hyphenated, then the hyphen gets dropped. In mainstream writing "thank you" only seems to have got as far along that line as being sometimes hyphenated.
Goodbye was originally 'have a jolly good bye, guv'nuh' and got hyphenated to 'jolly good-bye' and is now 'goodbye.' Just made that up, obviously, and also obviously language changes and this sort of combining does take place. However, as I'm sure you're very aware of Maia, as you've seen more fiction that most of us surely, fiction is very often a more conservative form of language, and expectations don't change nearly as fast as in conversational English or worse, teh internetz. Having a character say 'like totes whatev.' is fine, but NOT a good idea to send out a manuscript with a modified slangy word like 'totes' or 'whatev' Personally, I'll mark ever thankyou I see in a manuscript, whether it's dialog or not. But hey, there are no rules in writing and it's all so subjective anyways amirite?, we're allowed todo whatev we want cuz its are own story were tellin'!
Pall bearer -> pall-bearer -> pallbearer Port hole -> port-hole -> porthole Non-sense -> nonsense (I'm not sure it was ever two separate words). All those examples from Fowler.
Looks weird, but I like it... maybe a new word is born... Thankyou/thank you - seems like a matter of personal choice then? To me the syllables were always stressed differently (THANKyou/thank YOU) so I just wrote them blindly according to how I wanted a character to say it...
