In his New Year message for 1940, Joseph Goebbels complained that the ‘warmongering cliques in London’ hated the German people because they were ‘hard-working [arbeitsam] and intelligent’. I certainly found it odd that the Conservatives in their party conference should use ‘hardworking’ as their catchphrase. But it was odd not because of Dr Goebbels, but because it had been flogged so hard by Gordon Brown during the Blairite era of errors and distortions. If it was so easily forgotten as a Labour slogan, why deploy it again in the Conservative interest?
The Tory conference organisers wrote hardworking as one word. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that hard, before a participial adjective, is ‘always hyphenated’ when the compound is used attributively, as in ‘hard-boiled egg’. When it is used predicatively the word order may change: ‘Will you have it hard-boiled?’ or ‘Are the eggs boiled hard?’ There’s also a difference in meaning between: ‘The family was working hard’ and ‘The family was hard-working.
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