Ok, I’m behind… So here is a quick thought.

One of the things you will hear often if you hang out with editors is the question: Is such-and-such word open or closed? By this they mean is a word/phrase like ‘black face’ spelled out as two words (black face), hyphenated (black-face) or closed (blackface). The rule of thumb is usually how common has the word/phrase become. If it is relatively new or unused it remains open. If it is starting to enter the common language as a compound then hyphenate it. And if it is so super-common that people don’t bother to read it as two separate words that describe a concept then it becomes closed. Yes, yes, I know. I did say it was a rule-of-thumb (see what I did there?).

Anyway, by closing words, we can lose the original meaning and it can sometimes result in a duh moment. For example, a character in a novel I am reading stopped by his brother’s townhouse. I pictured a multi-story connected housing unit in the city. And for what its worth that was pretty close to what it was. But since the setting is Elizabethan London, where the character was going was actually his brother’s town house. You know, the smaller home that he maintains in the crowded city as opposed to his sprawling country house.

Since we still have homes in that style and have for hundreds of years, common usage has decided we close the compound: townhouse. And as a result the meaning has shifted form one of location, to one of construction. Since very, very few of us have country houses or even think in those terms, we don’t close that compound. In the case of the novel, the editor chose to close townhouse as we do in modern English, but I think that was a mistake. To them (the characters) it was simply the house in town or the house in the country.