Phone Sex

If you're a Mac geek, which I am, you've been waiting for something like this for ages: the iPhone. I couldn't have any less interest in actually owning one (I have a cell phone and an iPod already, thanks), but the technology behind it is just dazzling. If I had a lot of money and I needed a phone and an iPod, I would be all over this, because it is gorgeous.

You can't buy an iPhone as of this writing, but you can ask them to send you information when it becomes available, and the appropriate menu item reads "Sign-up". So I clicked on it: I didn't really intend to sign up for more information, but I was reading all the menu items and couldn't see any reason to skip that one.

"Sign-up", or "signup", is usually an adjective: "sign-up fees", for example, or "signup bonus". It can also be a noun, of course: "His sign-up went well." But on the page is the following text:

Sign-up here to receive more information about iPhone and related products from Apple.

To which I can only say no no no goddammit no! "Sign-up" is not a verb. Ever! "Sign up" is the phrasal verb. No hyphen, because phrasal verbs consisting of a verb and a preposition do not take hyphens. Ever!

This also means that the menu item is meant to be a verb as well, despite the fact that it's hyphenated and therefore wrong. But the title of the page itself is

Apple - iPhone - Sign up

which means that at least two different people worked on the page, and one of them knows what's right and one of them doesn't. (You could, I guess, argue that the page title should also be hyphenated because it's meant to be a noun, but my preference would be to treat all the instances on the page as imperative verbs. It reads better, in my opinion.) People stick hyphens into phrases all the time and it's ugly and horrible.

Why should I care so much about this? I don't know. Why am I using so many italics? Because I'm so pissed off!