blame it on the lean-to
It wasn't until recently that I really started paying close attention to the text of the "Little House" books, including the words themselves. What I keep noticing is that Wilder changes the format of compound words from book to book, and even uses multiple formats in the same book.

Take cornbread, for example. Sometimes it's cornbread, sometimes it's corn-bread, sometimes it's corn bread. There are dozens of cases, from apple-sauce to what-nots, or from apple sauce to whatnots; take your pick.

You would think that editors would pick up on these sort of things over the decades, and either usage would be standardized throughout the books or there would have been some mention of the fact over the years. It's no secret that the books contain spelling and punctuation mistakes that have in every edition since the first "uniform" edition in the fifties, although I have to give someone credit for correcting some of the mistakes for the colorized edition.

Of course, Rose and Laura may not have welcomed any corrections. At one point, the word plow was "corrected" to be plough, and Rose was not amused.

Then there's the handwritten note from Laura to Rose in the manuscript for On the Banks of Plum Creek that says: "Lean-to is spelled with a hyphen, but I just found it out and I may miss some that I have written without." Lean-to appears with a hyphen in all "Little House" books.

It's enough to make me wonder if editor(s) at Harper Brothers hadn't gotten an earful over the plow incident and decided to just leave everything as written and not try to "correct" any more of Wilder's words, lest somebody make a fuss over it.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:42 AM