Ghostwriter or ghost writer? Who cares, right? Tut tut.
To be honest, I thought I knew – one word, ghostwriter because that is what was established. Andrew Crofts says ghostwriter, Wikipedia says ghostwriter and in the kids’ TV series, the character of Ghostwriter ‘can communicate with the kids only by manipulating whatever text and letters he can find and then using them to form words and sentences,’ quite a thing to do really – manipulate words, and this seems to be what happens with language, and in many different complicated ways. But is this manipulation of the word from one to another wrong or natural? In the 2010 film by Roman Polanski “The Ghost Writer”, a ‘British ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is hired to complete the autobiography of former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).’
I wanted to know what I was, what my job is called – and I still do. Consulting my SEO engineer ‘Steve’, more people are in fact looking to find a ‘ghost writer’ than a ‘ghostwriter’, so is my changing ghostwriter to ghost writer to appear more ‘there’ on the Google rankings the thing to do or is this me ‘re-writing’ the word to accommodate a mis spell? To understand this, we need to understand what language is. Or maybe Polanski just knew how to spell ghostwriter and ghostwriters the world over have been wrong all along? How does change happen? What is the English language?