[tei-council] A nice easy one

[Kevin Hawkins]

Being a bit of a nut for orthography, I wholeheartedly support 
"stand-off" or "standoff" but never "stand off" when used as an 
adjective, as in "stand-off markup".  I don't think any of use "stand 
off" as a verb (never hyphenated in any case) or as a noun (hyphenation 
debatable).

The hyphenation fanatics get riled up over hyphenated words vs. space 
between words, not hyphenated words vs. written as one word.  You write 
something as one word if it becomes well known as a compound and isn't 
hard to read without the hyphen.  That's why it's okay to write "email". 
  There are a a few ossified exceptions (like "ice cream") that are 
unfortunate pollutions of the purity of the English language. ;-)

Kevin