LANGUAGE CORNER
Hyphens
Those Wild and Crazy Hyphens
Stacy Moore, managing editor of the Hi-Desert Star in Yucca Valley, Calif., e-mailed to ask about hyphenation, a topic that could fill a book (now there's a chilling thought). She and a writer at the paper differed over whether to hyphenate "big city," "beach front," and "ice cold" as compound adjectives in front of nouns. Ms. Moore concluded, "I say hyphenate 'em all."
Agreed.
The classic reason for using hyphens with compounds is to avoid ambiguity. The hyphen links two or more words instantly for the reader's rapidly moving eye. "Big-city" is a perfect example. A "big city man" is a large man from a city. A "big-city man" is a man from a large city, and the hyphen is mandatory to pull the two words together to make one modifier. "Forty-odd employees" would be silly without the hyphen. So would "small-business man" (which requires splitting "businessman" in two).
Beyond that, "big-city" just wants a hyphen because convention calls for it. And, even though they're not likely to be misunderstood when they're hyphen-free, that's also true of "beach-front" (also reasonable as one word, noun and adjective) and "ice-cold."
Or so it says here. Some decisions about hyphens, especially decisions about what convention requires, are open to argument. And the same compounds will appear hyphenated in one good publication and naked in another. Style, not right or wrong, determines which ones go which way.
Some editors, including this one after many a year, like hyphens better than others do. But we of the pro-hyphen school would do well remember a Churchillian pearl: "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided whenever possible."
— CJR, Sept./Oct. 2002
Futhermore:
In the second paragraph above, the phrase "rapidly moving" combines an adverb and an adjective to form one modifier describing "eye." Yet the compound takes no hyphen. That's because the adverbial ending "ly" is almost universally considered to perform the bridging function that a hyphen would otherwise take care of.
"Very" also needs no hyphen to link it to an adjective, by common consent — "very popular singer." It's just an adverb modifying an adjective. So, usually, are "most," "more," "least," "less" and other such words used in phrases like most beloved teacher, least likely outcome, less complex solution.
That last was published with a hyphen, and there's no reason for one. Nor was there in "the nation's most-populous state" or "several more-famous plays," also hyphenated in print. (An exception with "most": the FBI's Most-Wanted List. It's not a list that is somehow most wanted, it's "most" and "wanted" linked to make one adjective describing "list." It needs a clarifying hyphen.)
In deciding whether to use a hyphen, it may be useful — and, of course, it may be maddening — to remember that printed lines can break in funny places. Look how these broke:
1. "…. he was the longest"
2. " …just months removed from the end of Juan Antonio
Samaranch's dictatorship of arrogance and secrecy, along
came a figure"
3."…said one of the deportees, Sor Vann, 34, a heavy"
4. "many officials recall how Mr. Bush's father seemed
ill"
This is how those passages continued:
1. "serving of the chief rabbis in Europe"
2. "skating scandal at the Winter Games"
3. "equipment operator"
4. "attuned to economic conditions"
The guidelines for clarity or convention or both seem to require hyphens after all of those end-of-line words; their placement just compounds the problem when the hyphens are omitted. (The same guidelines surely called for a hyphen in the phrase "infectious disease expert," which was a tad risible without one, and "obstruction of justice laws," which was just a tad tough to read.)
The subject is far from exhausted, but the writer isn't. A closing thought from John Benbow, once editor of the stylebook of the Oxford University Press, quoted in the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage by William Morris and Mary Morris: "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad." Are we there yet?
Addendum, 12/02/02:
The last word on this subject in this space goes to John Kilkenny of Melbourne, Australia, an amateur grammarian, who waded through that "lucubration" (as he called it, not kindly but justifiably) and begged to differ with one example. The phrase "several more-famous plays," he e-mailed, needs that hyphen to say that the plays are more famous than the one being discussed. With no hyphen, it means several additional plays that, like this one, were famous. The hyphen seems unusually unlovely in such a phrase, but without rewording, it's defensible unless the context is totally clear.
