A spelling mistake I see very often is "Sing-a-long", as in "Sing-a-long Messiah". As opposed to "Sing-a-short Messiah"?
Ok, so Messiah is a long sing, but that's not what they meant! It mystifies me why people don't recognize the adverb "along" when they write this phrase. "Along" is hardly an obscure word! The audience is singing along with the performers. In fact, you can even write "singalong" as one word (although admittedly it does look vaguely Malaysian), thus saving you the question of where to include hyphens at all. So your choices are:
Singalong Messiah or Sing-along Messiah.
P.S.
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None of these words -- along, away, ago -- have any connection with the Latin ad-. They are all from Germanic sources, and the a- came from different words in each case. In "along", it was originally and- (against, facing, in a direction opposite).
ReplyDelete"Away" is from the phrase "on one's way", which already in Old English was reduced to "away".
"Ago" is so complicated that I may well write a whole post about it sometime, but suffice to say that the prefix "a-" in Old English meant "forth" or "out".
Latin "ad" (to) usually got affixed to verbs already in Latin, and then the whole word including the prefix came into English either directly from Latin or via French, e.g. admit, adverse, adventure, aggregate, etc. etc. I can't think of any examples where Latin ad- got affixed to an Anglo-Saxon root.