Dear CC:
You wrote:
>”Long-Time Hyphenated Words ”
>Hi, The above is one of the headings on your website and I’m wondering if it’s grammatically correct to capitalize the 2nd part of a hypenated word? Or is it one of those things that doesn’t really matter anymore?
>Thanks.
Some editors may do it differently, but this is a title, so every word except for short connecting words is capitalized. Since “long-time” is a compound formed from two words that are usually separate, we would capitalize the second part since it is considered a separate word.
If anything, this is the older way of doing things. I have some nineteenth century bird books (including Audubon facsimiles); in those books the birds names are often hyphenated (e.g. “blue-bird” and “black-bird”) and whenever they are used in titles, both parts are capitalized. We do not used hyphens as often as they did in the nineteenth century.
Help me with this, please. Is Old Town Co-Owners Association correct? Or should it be Co-owners? And would the acronym be OTCOA or OTCA?
“Co-Owners” would be better. “Owners” would be capitalized if there were no “Co” since it is part of a name. It is not uncommon to have hyphenated prefixes before proper nouns, as in pre-Columbian. One could make a case that the hyphen is only for clarity here and the O in Owners would not normally be capitalized. However, because Owners is the main part of the name, the item after the hyphen would still be capitalized. Probably the most famous or infamous example of this is The Committee for the Re-Election of the President of Watergate fame. They did capitalize the second E in Election.
For a little more on this see https://englishplus.com/grammar/00000126.htm.
The acronym is up to you. The above committee officially called itself the CRP; however, supporters of McGovern called it CREEP. Either of your choices works. Usually shorter acronyms are easier to remember, but the longer one may sound better or be easier to pronounce. That is up for the organization to decide.
Technically, there should also be an apostrophe after the s in Co-Owners because it is a plural possessive. It should be written out as Old Town Co-Owners’ Association.