Who cares?

Spider-Man? Other than that, I can only picture a pale pock faced youth sitting in a basement surrounded by every Spider-Man Comic, graphic novel, book, toy, etc. (and, yes there is a high probability that it is merely a flashback)silently seething as he tries to get past the little M in his heroes name. :)

(I suspect you may find some people at Howling Curmudgeons who do too.)

To paraphrase Data: "One is his name, the other is not."

I do respect your opinion, and your towering knowledege of comics. I can't bring myself to care about the hyphen in SpiderHyphenMan. I am, however, open to persuasive arguments.

My own hot buttons are "nucular" and "hacker." Like most people around me, I am likely to say "hot water heater," but I am aware of the redundancy. Teresa has taught me that "supersede" is more correct than "supercede," though I was betrayed by a dictionary long ago. She has also reinforced my convictions about the correctness of the Oxford Comma (with some help from my parents, Ayn Rand and God).

I am neutral on the question of "Batman" versus "The Batman."

Thanks, Anne! I won't try to turn this into a podcasting thread, but as a quick aside, if you're having technical problems (and this goes for anyone) please drop us an e-mail any time. Losing listeners because they don't like our content is fair. Losing listeners because the technology is a pain in the ass is unacceptable, and we'll do our best to prevent it.

When I was but a wee lad dialing into BBSes, I used to pronounce "sysop" with a long "i," even after I learned it was wrong. The word always reminded me of "Cyclops," and I wanted to celebrate the similarity.

Though I don't speak for all Howling Curmudgeons, I will have to chime in on David's side: It's "Spider-Man", one hyphen, two capital letters, and it matters.

To be perhaps a little grandiose about it, I think that it's a basic human dignity to be called what you choose to be called. Mormons are, for example, Christians, because they call themselves Christians, even if most other Christians would call them non-Christian.

My friend Pete Vonder Haar's last name is another example: If you don't spell it with that particular spacing and capitalization, you've simply gotten it wrong, and that is disrespectful to him.

Extrapolating the principal to fictional characters is admittedly more marginal, but even as the claim to human dignity wanes, the call of orthodox orthography remains at least as strong.

Plus, it's a fact thing; David and I happen to be expert comics nerds, so we know certain details, which, when wrong, stand out to us. A beam jockey would notice and care if someone mistypes some fact about the Main Injector just the same, I would expect.

It also breaks Wikipedia.

I've heard of under-read D&D'ers who speak of "die-tees" and "geeses".

Given the expression in that photo, it's almost certain they're doing something wicked; given Esther, my question is whether the proper response would be a howl of anguish or a butterfly net.

You did that on purpose, right? I've never seen the potential confusion between the appositive and listing functions of commas demonstrated quite so well, though I could've done without the mental image of the Annunciation of Ayn Rand.

"Please, lady, no smoking next to the manger."

Rob Hansen once spotted a TV listing in The Times of London which contained a reference to "Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector." This is more baroque than "my parents, Ayn Rand and God" but has the advantage of being known to have really been published.

"Please, lady, no smoking next to the manger."

Yeah, something like that. Think a medieval altarpiece with a black-and-white photo of Rand's head (preferably oversized) and a cigarette mentally Photoshopped in.