@Brus - I concede your first point - actually I had already conceded it at the end of my last post; I accept that it was a bad comparison to make between a compound verb and a phrasal verb. All I was trying to say was that it was ironic that you had used a hyphen where most people wouldn't, in a comment criticising the use of hyphens.

As to your second, unfortunately language doesn't always follow logic - why baby-sit but whitewash? When it comes to compound verbs, and even more so, compound nouns, which can be two words - 'fire alarm', hyphenated - 'fire-eater' or one word - 'fireguard', it is impossible to work our which it should be from logic, as there are no rules, only usage. The only way is to check a dictionary. After all, that's what they're there for.

The only measure linguists recognise is usage, which is why I look stuff up, not only in dictionaries but in corpora, published works etc. I studied history, and historians look for evidence, primary and secondary - that was how I was brought up.

Of course, we can all simply give our opinions, but without evidence, that's all they are: opinions. I prefer to work with something a little more solid. As for looking at dictionaries in a critical way rather than an accepting way, I'm afraid I take it for granted that professional lexicographers working in a team, who not only have considerable professional training and experience, but who also have access to a vast corpus of real examples of language use, are likely to have a rather better idea of how words are formed and spelt than me trying to work it out by logic. I also check quite a few dictionaries at one time, so I can see that there is a consensus.

Anyway, the simple fact is I like researching things an looking them up; it's fun. I spend a lot of time on linguistics blogs, and working any other way would simply be regarded as assertionism.

Just to finish on a note of agreement. I agree with you about the capitals; I hadn't noticed The College and Governors.

@Brus

1) horrible is totally subjective, and has nothing to do with whether something is correct or not. I hear 'feedback' nearly every day in business contexts and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I would also argue that there is a subtle difference between response and feedback. Feedback is more general than response. Perhaps I gave a bad example. In these examples from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary I think it would be more difficult to substitute feedback with response:

I'd appreciate some feedback on my work.
The teacher will give you feedback on the test.
We need both positive and negative feedback from our customers.

2) I never said anything about proofread being two words; I simply said that the standard dictionary spelling is proofread - one word without a hyphen, while you chose to hyphenate it. You say 'proofread isn't right either'. OK, that's your opinion, but it puts you out of kilter with virtually every dictionary.

OneLook, which looks up words in over two dozen dictionaries, finds only three which list "proof-read": Wiktionary, which refers to it as an alternative spelling of 'proofread', and The Free Dictionary and Wikipedia, both of which redirect to the hyphenless 'proofreading'.

Conversely, OneLook finds 23 dictionary entries for 'proofread', including in Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Collins, Macmillan and Cambridge.

http://www.onelook.com/?w=proof-read

I will agree with you on one thing though: while some compound verbs, like baby-sit and second-guess are hyphenated, this doesn't usually apply to phrasal verbs, where a particle (preposition or adverb) is involved, such as 'check in', 'lay off' or 'go ahead', all of which can be turned into hyphenated nouns.

This might also interest you:

http://www.proofreadnow.com/blog/bid/29485/Grammar-Usage-Compound-Verbs

1. Capitals - I think this is OK as the whole page takes its title from and is about a named unit - the Senior Management Team - at a named institution - Fettes College. These and only these nouns are capitalised.

2. 'feedback' - I agree with you here, but prefer your second solution - 'provide feedback', as the phrasal verb 'feed back' is usually used transitively about something specific - 'the results will be fed back to the committee'. Although 'report back to' would be a suitable replacement to 'provide feedback', 'report to' has a slightly different meaning - it just means who you are responsible to - 'I report directly to the sales director'. Whatever we may think about it, 'feedback' is here to stay, and is often a more efficient way of describing things than any alternative - 'the feedback from the survey has been overwhelmingly positive'.

Fettes, however, is not alone among British educational establishments to use 'feedback' as a verb:

'This is part of a larger culture change which will take time, but part of that change is adapting the ways in which we feedback to students' - The Higher Education Academy, an independent advisory institution

'As shown in Figure 1, we feedback to significant regions' - abstract from an academic paper at the University of Surrey.

'As teachers we feedback to students all the time in a range of different ways.' teaching blog at Teesside University

'There are a number of channels which you can use to feedback to the University and your College' - University of Arts, London

It also seems quite popular at NHS and local government sites. It is possible we have a verb in the making here. (But I don't suppose that'll make you think any more highly of it).

3. 'as appropriate' - As this page is describing the functions of the Senior Management Team, I don't really find this superfluous as it presumably means something like: 'if and when necessary and who to' (they provide feedback to two groups - the staff and the governors - some things will only need to be reported to one group, some things to others) - in fact they manage to say quite a lot in those two words.

4. 'Check-in here' - Broadly agree with you here, but it could conceivably be read as an ellipsis of 'The check-in is here'. At a Google images search, most of the hyphenated examples are for an American ' location-based social networking website for mobile devices' (Wikipedia) called Foursquare, and here they could possibly be using it as a noun, but they also have almost identical signs with two separate words.

I'll have to take your word for it concerning Gatwick, and it's true that the Thistle Hotel at Heathrow encourages customers to 'Check-in online'. But Gatwick also have hyphenless 'Check in' signs and you'll be glad to hear that the flag carrier, British Airways, says 'Hello, please check in here'.

But hyphens are tricky things, and usage changes over time. Did you really mean to write 'proof-read'? Although it's possible to find a handful of examples at Google Books, all the dictionaries I've checked have it as one unhyphenated word. Granted, one or two allow it as an alternative spelling to proofread, but that rather begs the question (in the non-purist sense): if you can hyphenate 'proofread', why not 'check in'?

http://www.holidayextras.co.uk/airport-hotels/gatwick/twilight-check-in.html
http://www.britishairways.com/travel/sscidemo1/public/en_gb

I pefer, you pefer, he pefers

I pefer the slightly different -
"Thus, the heroes of today are no longer living individuals but the anonymous dead."

@Darren Lee - on second thoughts, perhaps not so whacky, as the two probably are usually the same (but I've never heard any rule about this), but it doesn't work when it comes to do and have: we talk about the "the haves and the have nots", not "the has and the has nots".

@Hekter Hairfoot McGlammery - I don't doubt you, but I thought we were more interested in spelling here than in genealogy. Incidentally, you got your James numbers reversed.

@WordMasterRick - Merriam-Webster gives both pronunciations of (n)either for American English \ˈnē-thər also ˈnī-\ - In British English we have a choice and I'm pretty sure I say \'naɪðə(r)\ ("I") on some occasions and ˈ\niːðə(r)\ ("E") on others.

@Darren Lee - I use an apostrophe in do's myself, but that's a pretty whacky piece of deduction of yours. In all the stuff I've read about do's and don'ts, I wonder why nobody has come up with that one before.

The fact that plurals and 3rd person singular both end in s is pure coincidence; 3rd person singular used to end in th in some dialects - he hath, while plural s came from the Saxon genitive case ending - es.

What's more, there must be relatively few verb noun and verb combinations where they take the same form. OK, it works with watch / watches, cry / cries etc. But these are standard nouns. The whole point is that do and don't in this sense are not normally nouns. Just as p and q are not normally nouns, but we can have p's and q's. They are nominal representations of something else, verbs and letters.

In British English, however, there is another way to use do as a noun - for a party or social event - "Are you having a big do for your birthday?" And the plural is - dos:

"I just thought it must be someone from the Manor. They're always having dos and
things up there." - Lost Kitty, by Natasha Duncan Drake.

Nice try though. But you're rather closer to the mark with your last point.

@Hekter Hairfoot McGlammery - the Seton bit may be true, but you have to go way back to the sixth earl (1588–1661) to find the Seton who changed his name to Montgomerie, part of the conditions of the entail made by his cousin, the childless fifth earl, Hugh Montgomeriey, and confirmed by James VI. In any case, the name (what we're interested in here) has continued unchanged from Hugh Montgomerie, 1st Earl of Eglinton (c.1460 - 1545) to the present.

As for the Montgommery spelling, I think it's the case that there was a lot of inconsistency in the spelling of names in the 'old days'. This is from French Wikipedia:

'La famille Montgommery (ou Montgomery, Montgomeri) est une importante famille normande originaire du Calvados.'

Roger (1) de Montgommery was part of the entourage of Robert, Duke of Normandy, and his son Roger sailed with Robert's son, one William the Bastard, to England in 1066, and served William so well he was given a considerable amount of land, stretching over both England and Wales, and awarded the title of Earl of Shrewesbury in 1074. While the French Wikipedia spells his name de Montgommery, English Wikipedia spells it de Montgomerie. The Welsh county of Montgomeryshire is apparently called after him.