{"id":407,"date":"2008-11-04T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T18:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/togo\/"},"modified":"2011-05-31T19:29:38","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T01:29:38","slug":"togo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/11\/togo\/","title":{"rendered":"“TOGO”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this on a restaurant receipt.<\/p>\n

Problem:<\/strong>
\nA hyphen is missing.<\/p>\n

Explanation:<\/strong>
\nI ordered some “take-out” food from a restaurant a couple of evenings ago.<\/p>\n

While I was waiting for my order to be prepared, I studied the receipt.<\/p>\n

Printed in all capital letters in the middle of it was “TOGO” — spelled T-O-G-O.<\/p>\n

Beyond the ridiculousness of using all capital letters given the mixed-case font used throughout the receipt, the designer of the receipt surely did not mean to refer to the African country officially known as the Togolese Republic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No, the designer was trying to indicate that the order was a take-out order — that the order was “to-go” — spelled T-O-HYPHEN-G-O.<\/p>\n

The format of the receipt was more than four characters wide, so the omission of the hyphen between “TO” and “GO” could not be blamed on lack of space.<\/p>\n

I believe that the omission of the hyphen is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the hyphen than to include it.<\/p>\n

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:<\/p>\n