Hyphen Highlights

An old managing editor once started a hyphen war with a memo that began, “I don’t want to start a hyphen war.” We had a curmudgeonly old copyeditor, not me, who was insisting on “iced-cream cone,” with the “d” and the hyphen. That’s going too far.

With that in mind, I wrote this brief essay for a technical writer (a very good one) with whom I'm working. It's brief, because there are not many hard and fast rules. A lot depends on the writer’s ear.

It’s almost, but not quite, a rule that compound-adjective modifiers (like this one) should be hyphenated. But actually this one would be just about as good without the hyphen: “compound adjective modifiers.” It would be hard to misinterpret this. Same with “hard and fast rules” in the previous paragraph. But I always hyphenate “third-party provider,” because it’s just possible some newbie might read it carelessly as the third of several party providers. Silly, I know, but there you are. I also like the hyphen in a term like “managed-code environment,” because “managed code environment” might be read as a code environment that somehow is itself managed. I’m not bothered much by “a silver bullet solution,” since the term is familiar and not likely to be misread. Terms like “data length issue” and “user error rate” also seem clear enough, although there would be nothing wrong with putting in hyphens. However, “home-brewed data” definitely needs the hyphen. The two parts of that compound adjective are too closely related to go without it.

I went through a phase of hyphenating virtually every compound adjective, until a co-worker threatened to cut off my supply of hyphens. I’ve come around to a fairly simple solution: hyphenate the compound adjective when there’s a chance it will be misread; otherwise don’t worry about it. And try to be consistent.

There are also questions about when a compound has become a single word. “Free form” hasn’t quite made it yet—-and it should still be “a free-form solution,” not a form solution that’s somehow free.

There are other, less troublesome hyphen matters. Stylebooks have lists of words that require a hyphen between the prefix and the main part of the word. I've noticed phrases like “the concepts go hand-in-hand.” Hyphens aren't really needed there, because "hand in hand" isn’t a modifier and the meaning is clear without the hyphens. (But it would be “four-in-hand necktie.”) There’s the wonderful “suspensive hyphen,” as in “four- and five-year-old children.” I’ve speculated that there might even be a “reverse suspensive hyphen” as in “Japanese-Americans and -Canadians,” but so far grammarians aren’t lining up to adopt that one.

In summary, the only real rule is whether meaning is clear, and whether the use (or non-use) of a hyphen will grate on the reader’s ear.

A letter I received today from a pest control company desperately needed a hyphen. “Let us get rid of the pests and then inspect again,” it read. “We will retreat if any activity is sighted.”
Thank you very much, but I don’t want a pest eradicator who flees at the sight of a termite. But if he means “re-treat,” that’s fine.