Now that I’ve warned you about newspaper copy editors and about how hyphens wreak havoc with prefixes and suffixes, I feel you’re ready to entertain another dose of horror: Somewhere out there, at this very moment, two copy editors are having an argument that sounds something like this:
“You had no right to put a hyphen in the story I edited about the orange juice salesman.”
“You should have hyphenated it. In that context, ‘orange’ and ‘juice’ are forming a compound modifier and therefore require a hyphen. ‘Orange-juice salesman.’ ”
“But reasonable use dictates that ‘orange’ and ‘juice’ form a familiar compound, one a reader can recognize without the hyphen.”
“But without the hyphen, it’s not clear whether you’re talking about a man who sells orange juice or an orange man who sells some other kind of juice.”
“Oh yeah? Well . . . your mama dangles her participles!”
As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot—it’s the Bill Maher of punctuation.
This is true because hyphenation is in a state of anarchy. Most people don’t know how to use hyphens, and those who do keep making up their own rules as they go along. The hyphen is in such a pickle that you could easily argue it’s time to trash the whole system, perhaps rewrite the rule to say, “Hyphens are to be used whenever the writer thinks they look good and are not required otherwise.” But before you start a grassroots campaign to flush the whole business, consider this: Without the diversion of arguing about hyphens, thousands upon thousands of people just like the two above could end up with nothing better to do than to cruise your local bar trying to land a date—with you.
Copy editors need hyphens like prison inmates need cigarettes and Karl Rove needs pentagrams and babies’ blood.
Hyphenation is the first thing a lot of copy editors learn in their trade. The basic rule of hyphens—the first thing these eager young copy editors learn—is that they’re used to form compound modifiers, that is, to link two or more words that are acting as adjectives or sometimes adverbs.
The sentence, “The mime-punching clown went on a killing spree,” illustrates the way in which the hyphen helps your eye better see the writer’s meaning. Without the hyphen, you see “mime punching” and you wonder whom the mime is punching. But with the hyphen, you can see that it is the clown who’s doing the punching—punching mimes, for which we are all grateful.
So, while “orange juice” doesn’t take a hyphen, this rule dictates that it should when it’s modifying “salesman.”
The problem is, about half the copy editors in the world think that “orange-juice salesman” looks ridiculous. So they don’t do it, citing rules such as the Oxford English Grammar’s “a hyphen is inserted if it is needed to clarify which words belong together” as some newsroom equivalent of, “Go ahead. Make my day.” As a result we see Eats, Shoots & Leaves author Lynne Truss subtitling her book The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, and indeed skipping the hyphen in “zero tolerance.”
There’s an important exception to the compound-modifier rule: It doesn’t apply to adverbs ending in “-ly.” The idea here is that the “-ly” in “happily married couple” makes it clear that “happily” modifies “married” and not “couple.” Fair enough.
Many words also include hyphens in their official spelling; the only way to know which ones they are is to check a dictionary. But prepare for pain. In the dictionary, you’re likely to see that “water-ski” is a verb but the noun describing the equipment itself is “water ski.” The person doing the skiing, by the way, is always a “water-skier.” So, the water-skier water-skis on water skis. In the dictionary, you may also learn that an air conditioner air-conditions to provide air conditioning. Or perhaps that a virus can be airborne and also wind-borne.
Told you the little buggers were evil.
Despite how invidious hyphens can be, their main purpose is to help you. For example, if you want to write about a person who is creating something for a second time, but this comes out as “recreate,” which means to relax and have fun, throw in a hyphen: “re-create.” Same is true for a “recovering” (getting healthier) and “re-covering” (covering again), as in re-covering your sofa. If you want to write about someone entering a place a second time, but “reenter” looks too weird, again, throw in a hyphen: “re-enter.”
But what about all those other uses for hyphens we’ve all seen a million times and never thought about: head-butted, copy-edit, crop-dusting, multi-ethnic, cross-reference, two-thirds? Well, they’re all just evidence that the hyphens are life-sucking, mom-and-apple-pie-hating, mime-loving, nerd-fight-inciting daggers of the damned.
Therefore, whenever you’re faced with the question of whether to hyphenate something, ask yourself the following question: Do I want to be “right” by normal people’s standards, or do I need to be right-right, as in, must-withstand-the-slings-and-arrows-of-evil-hyphen-mavens right?
If you only need to know the basics, here’s what you do:
If you really need to know your stuff with hyphens, the rest of this chapter is for you.
The first thing you should do is buy an absurd number of books on the subject, read them over and over in a vain attempt to find some common ground, go berserk, and embark on a tri-state killing spree.
In prison, you’ll have a lot of time to decide which of these books is the camp you’re going to join. If you’re really into pain, I suggest the Chicago Manual of Style. After two pages of general guidelines for hyphenation and forming other compounds, Chicago lists sixty-six specific guidelines for everything from “age terms” (e.g., “three-year-old”) to “Web” (e.g., “Web site,” “Web-related matters,” “Web happy”).
Since they’re going nuts anyway, the Chicago folks figured, why leave simple rules alone? For example, the word “tunaborne” we created in chapter 13 was an example of a slightly annoying but not unreasonable rule: that “-borne” is an exception to the rule to hyphenate most suffixes. And if you thought it was bad enough that the grammar snobs expected you to memorize rules for specific suffixes such as “-borne,” consider the “help” offered by the Chicago Manual: “borne: ‘waterborne,’ ‘foodborne,’ ‘cab-borne,’ ‘mosquito-borne.’ (Normally closed, but hyphenated after words ending in b and after words of three or more syllables.)”
Chicago’s sixty-six hyphenation rules don’t include prefixes, by the way. That’s why there are another thirty-seven entries just for prefixes such as “extra-” (“ ‘extramural,’ ‘extrafine,’ but ‘extra-administrative’ ”) and “mega-” (“hyphenate before words beginning with an ‘a.’ ”)
Still determined to “learn” hyphenation? Then you might want to take note of the fact that the compound-modifier rule refers mostly to stuff that comes before a noun. After a noun, hyphens often are not needed. A well-known musician is well known.
Would you like some infuriating exceptions? You got ’em. Compounds so common they appear in the dictionary, terms like “good-looking,” keep their hyphens regardless of whether they come before or after a noun. Good-looking people are good-looking.
You’re still reading? You really want another exception? One that’s hotly debated among authorities and sure to prove that you can’t please all the snobs all the time? Okay.
Some books will tell you that compounds with words ending in “-ed,” such as “strong-willed,” are hyphenated regardless of whether they come before the noun. For example, Oxford says that you should always hyphenate “middle-aged,” “short-haired,” “strong-willed,” “long-winded,” “tight-lipped,” and “queen-sized”—a list that reads as if they compiled it by reading archived stories about the 1998 presidential impeachment. So, according to Oxford, Bill Clinton is middle-aged, short-haired, strong-willed, and long-winded. Monica Lewinsky is queen-sized and not very tight-lipped.
The Chicago Manual of Style disagrees with Oxford’s rule, saying that “-ed” compounds are hyphenated only before the noun. But their advice seems impractical in the above example: “Bill Clinton is middle aged, short haired, strong willed, and long winded while Monica is queen sized and not very tight lipped.” I miss the hyphens almost as much as I miss the days when Nixon was the closest any president had come to being impeached in my lifetime.
Still determined to “know” hyphenation? Then don’t forget to memorize all the rules in chapter 13 of this book, which deals specifically with prefixes and suffixes and when to hyphenate them. Oh, and you might want to bone up on the various rules governing numbers. For example, there’s never a hyphen before the word “percent” in things like, “a 12 percent chance,” but there’s always a hyphen when the number and another word are modifying a third word, as in, “a hundred-page document.” Ages expressed with “-year-old,” as in “ten-year-old” always take hyphens.
If you’re the type of person who is still reading even after all those maddening hurdles, you might find the following trick a little fun (a warning sign if there ever was one). Lists of hyphenated things can be treated as follows: “The haircuts look good on long- and short-haired women alike.” AP calls this “suspensive hyphenation.” Oxford refers to it as “linking,” and Chicago calls it “hyphen with word space.”
Once you’ve served out your entire prison term, during which you devoted every non-shiv-making moment to hyphenation, you still won’t know one hundred percent of the time how to use hyphens. You’ll just have a better idea of which book to open when you have a question.
Painful stuff? Yes. But it’s still better than fighting off advances from guys who get their jollies arguing about the color of juice salesmen.