New Pears every day at noon! This is Pears Game 428. The longest word in Game 427 was INTUITION.
The complete Pears archive is now open! Slate Plus members can play y00+ games of Pears anytime. It’s an all-you-can-eat Pears buffet!
Got a word to suggest? Let us know at pears@slate.com. Recent additions: YOYO. Yes, after many, many emails from people asking me to add YOYO, and me arguing that it’s hyphenated, I have given in. Many thanks to Pears player Susie M., who wrote this impassioned email, which I will quote in full:
I love Pears, but every time both the letters “Y” and “O” are included in the green circle, it grates on my last nerve. For months the word “yoyo” was rejected with no explanation, but you’ve since added the explanation that the word requires a hyphen.
Listen, years ago, in the pre-internet days, I did extensive research on the history of the toy in question. I learned that in the 1920’s when Donald F. Duncan first copyrighted the name, he used a hyphen. Other companies marketing their own versions of the same old folk toy had to be satisfied with calling theirs “return tops” or similar less satisfying names. Then (still in the 1920s) the Cheerio Toy Company tested the waters by calling their version the “yoyo,”
without the hyphen. At that moment Duncan was making a ridiculous amount of money while making his product as fast as he could without meeting the demand, so chose not to challenge Cheerio in court.
Soon a half dozen companies were selling their own hyphen-less yoyos and by then it was too late to challenge, as the word had become common language. Eventually, new manufacturers didn’t worry about the hyphen one way or the other, and both spellings could be seen in the retail market by multiple manufacturers.
I grant you that the hyphenated version of the word has remained the preferred spelling, but to ignore non-hyphenated yoyo is to turn our backs on the linguistic cleverness that made it an actual word rather than a brand name in the first place.
Please, Pears God, it costs you nothing to recognize yoyo as a word, and it would make my days a little sunnier and more carefree in this time of historic existential angst.
Done!