And I’ve been a technician for 8 ½ years and an instructor for 3 years! How can I show my face in public again? How can I possibly go on professionally? What is it that I’ve done, you ask? What could be so horrible? You’re probably guessing at this point that I’ve been putting a locking clip on a lap-only belt (Hey! I’m the one with the locking clips web page!). Nope, not that one. Nor have I been installing restraints with the clip-on style LATCH connectors upside down. Nope.
I have been spelling “car seat” as two distinctly separate words. Evidently that is the WRONG way to do it. Some background for you as to
how I suddenly had an epiphany about spelling the word “carseat”. (Aha! See, even my MS Word spellchecker thinks carseat is spelled incorrectly! I’ll have to fix that, I suppose.) I’m on my state’s CPS task force. It’s basically a think tank for all issues related to child passenger safety in our state. We’ve been tasked to create a curriculum to train our highway patrol officers, so our education subcommittee did just that. As a group we edited it, then I took over to re-edit and make some more changes. As I went through it, I noticed inconsistencies in the spelling of “car seat” and “carseat.” So, I polled my tech friends and found that I was the only one of many who spelled it as 2 words. Sigh. I’ve seen it spelled lots of times as a single word, but I’m stubborn and right most of the time, lol, and, well, you get the drift. So, I’ll eat a piece of humble pie and spell it the way the rest of you do.
Then, as I went on through the curriculum, wouldn’t you know: belt positioning booster. OK, so how do you spell it? Belt positioning booster or belt-positioning booster? I went with the hyphenated version in the curriculum, but darn, I’m lazy and I’m not gonna hyphenate if I don’t have to 😀 .
Change is so hard, don’t you think? You’ll have to give me a break if I slip and spell carseat as 2 words. Perhaps I should just stick with “restraint” from here on out 😉 .
I usually use carseat for CSRS (there’s another for you, Murphydog) and vehicle seat for, well, the vehicle seat. I try to avoid any confusion about what a car seat is, and vehicle is more encompassing since carseats can go in things other than cars.
I try to use carseat when talking about an automotive child restraint installed aftermarket, and car seat when talking about the seats in a car. It’s silly, but I like silly things.
I use carseat and vehicle seat.
🙂 I hope to someday use restraint.
SafetyBeltSafe USA uses “car seat”, “belt-positioning booster”, and “belt path” and maybe that’s where I got it from (except for the hyphenated bpb). I don’t know. Maybe this is one of those times where it’s become generic enough to have one spelling, like Kleenex means tissue and so on (though Kimberly-Clark’s trademark attorneys wouldn’t want you to think so, lol).
One thing I’d definitely like to see standardized is the acronym for child restraint. Is it CRS or CRD or CR or whatever else combination I know I’ve seen but can’t remember ATM. Sometimes it takes me a minute to sit and figure out the wording in the acronym!
I prefer carseat, because car seat sounds like a vehicles built in adult size seat. It’s a relatively new word thus there are some inconsistencies.
I think we decided that carseat was a CS and car seat was a vehicle seat once. So that’s how I do it.
“Belt-positioning” should definitely be hyphenated.
As for the other things…eh, stuff changes over time and there’s not always a right and wrong. Website used to be two words and the first was always capitalized (“I went to their Web site the other day.”), but now it’s more common to see it “website.”
I like carseat more than car seat (because “car seat” sounds like the seat of the car, whereas “carseat” sounds like a child restraint), but “car seat” seems to be the conventional wisdom, so that’s what I go with.
Carseat
Beltpath
Seatbelt
In these instances, I prefer to use one compound word. It doesn’t really matter to me because I know what I’m talking about but I believe it helps to clarify things for the reader.
I don’t usually type belt-positioning booster but that is definitely the correct way to spell it.
As a professional writer/editor who is also a CPST, I’m stickin’ with car seat and belt-positioning booster. 😉
I’d blame the spell checker – it always gave me the wiggly red underline when I wrote “Carseat” (aha, it did it again!)
JMO but I usually hyphenate belt-positioning, maybe because “belt” can also be used a verb (as in, “seeing the lousy belt fit made me want to belt the @#$!! positioning booster”)
ROFL! I never would have thought the owner of carseatsite.com wouldn’t spell it as one word ;).
I started splitting carseat into two words thanks to car-seat.org! Now what can I believe?! LOL