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Beramba was a troop ship. We (unusually?) have no article that I can find. Rich Farmbrough 14:30, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
I removed the hyphen.
Au contraire, my anonymous friend. The phrase without the hyphen not only makes perfect sense, it makes exactly the sense it should mean. The phrase with the hyphen introduces an ambiguity as to what it could possibly mean - so why on earth would you do that, unless you were intending to be unclear? You seem to be reading "then" as an adverb, whereas it is obviously being used adjectivally.
Think of it like this: If you are now married to your 4th wife, and you are relating something that happened when you were married to wife No.2, you could refer to her (the 2nd wife) as "my then wife", to distinguish her from "my current wife". You should certainly not hyphenate either of those expressions (much and all as journalists are prone to do these days).
This is the same. NSW was then (meaning, at the time we're talking about, Evan Allan's birth) a British colony, so in "the then British colony of NSW", then performs the functions of an adjective that qualifies "British colony". Assuming the reader has no knowledge of Australia (as we should), "then-British colony" allows the perfectly reasonable interpretation that NSW was a colony of Britain at that time , but Britain was not always its owner before Federation, and some other unnamed country could have colonised NSW in the intervening period. From our knowledge of history, we know that would be a false conclusion to come to. It's certainly still a valid sentence grammatically, but far from valid as a true statement about history. Bad grammar leads to bad history. The hyphen must go because it is misleading. JackofOz 02:28, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
The second sentence reads strangely "he was the last Australian to have seen action overseas" I know something else is meant to be there it already says he is the oldest. perhaps someone who has a little more knowledge could correct this typo, otherwise a great read.-- Matt 09:59, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
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This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Beramba was a troop ship. We (unusually?) have no article that I can find. Rich Farmbrough 14:30, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
I removed the hyphen.
Au contraire, my anonymous friend. The phrase without the hyphen not only makes perfect sense, it makes exactly the sense it should mean. The phrase with the hyphen introduces an ambiguity as to what it could possibly mean - so why on earth would you do that, unless you were intending to be unclear? You seem to be reading "then" as an adverb, whereas it is obviously being used adjectivally.
Think of it like this: If you are now married to your 4th wife, and you are relating something that happened when you were married to wife No.2, you could refer to her (the 2nd wife) as "my then wife", to distinguish her from "my current wife". You should certainly not hyphenate either of those expressions (much and all as journalists are prone to do these days).
This is the same. NSW was then (meaning, at the time we're talking about, Evan Allan's birth) a British colony, so in "the then British colony of NSW", then performs the functions of an adjective that qualifies "British colony". Assuming the reader has no knowledge of Australia (as we should), "then-British colony" allows the perfectly reasonable interpretation that NSW was a colony of Britain at that time , but Britain was not always its owner before Federation, and some other unnamed country could have colonised NSW in the intervening period. From our knowledge of history, we know that would be a false conclusion to come to. It's certainly still a valid sentence grammatically, but far from valid as a true statement about history. Bad grammar leads to bad history. The hyphen must go because it is misleading. JackofOz 02:28, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
The second sentence reads strangely "he was the last Australian to have seen action overseas" I know something else is meant to be there it already says he is the oldest. perhaps someone who has a little more knowledge could correct this typo, otherwise a great read.-- Matt 09:59, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
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Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 17:56, 7 April 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on William Evan Allan. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 23:22, 13 January 2018 (UTC)