I’m tossing this question out as one of those “get
a feel for the consensus” attempts. In modern English, “no one”
is typically written without a hyphen. The OED says of the hyphenated version that
“…[it] seems to have been introduced in the mid 19th century
and to have remained uncommon until the late 20th century. It
remains a minority variant.” There are cases in which one could
argue for a distinction between no one’s “not one”
meaning and its “none” meaning, and I could see an argument for
using a hyphen to distinguish the latter (since the two uses would have
different stress patterns):
We couldn’t assign individual blame, since no one of
them had made the actual decision; it was a group process.
Vs.
We couldn’t assign blame, since no one among them had
made the actual decision; it came from elsewhere.
So here’s the question: to what extent is “no-one”
to be considered nonstandard? By calling it “a minority variant,”
the OED is being admirably descriptive, but there’s a difference between
saying “it’s rare” and saying “it’s rare and it’s
considered an error.” I know it looks odd, because I’m not
used to seeing it, but I learned long ago not to let observations of frequency transform
themselves into mandates without consideration.
Thanks in advance,
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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