Hyphenetically Speaking

The Hyphen is one of those curious characters left over from ancient systems of writing, something like the ‘Pilcrow’ (  ¶ ) but much more common.

In Greek, it means ‘under one,’ (ὑπό ἕν = hypá³ hén) and was originally much like a simple underline written under two consecutive characters to indicate that they belonged to the same word. This helped to reduce ambiguity in phrases like:

‘WHENIWASACHILDANICEMANLIVEDNEXTDOOR’

By ‘joining’ the N and the I in this way, it was much simpler to distinguish the difference between ‘an iceman’ and ‘a nice man’. Everything else in this little sentence can be figured out with comparatively little effort, so of course they didn’t bother.

If you’ll glance at the blog entry on Paragraphs, you’ll see that spaces between words are a relatively recent invention, because parchment, which was made from real lamb skins, was way too expensive to waste on frivolous things like empty space when any fool could figure out where word boundaries were located for themselves.

Mind you, back in those days, speed-reading hadn’t been invented either, so taking half an hour to figure out what a single page of text meant was a worthwhile investment.

Well, to make a long story short, eventually cheap paper made of plant fibres was invented and the riffraff learned to read, thereby putting a lot of scribes out of business, since the act of writing a simple letter home was no longer a commercial transaction involving a third-party writer on one end and a third-party reader on the other. One still finds them in societies where illiteracy is common, but in most of the ‘Western World’ one needs them almost as rarely as one needs a blacksmith to shoe a horse or a tinker to mend a broken pot.

The appearance of spaces between words left the handy textual metacomment that the hyphen represented available for other purposes, and in fact it was drafted into service for several notions, the most common in handwritten missives being the underline which adds emphasis, usually represented in printed text as italics.

The second use — which also preserves the original meaning of a ‘joining’ between two things — is today’s ordinary hyphen, which we use for many purposes hovering around some sort of linkage, whether explicit or implied.

Hyphenated Names

In some traditions, and in some families, it’s customary to join the family names of certain married individuals with that of their spouses, that is: Mary Smith, MD might marry Joe Schmoe, carpenter, and decide either to keep her professional name, Mary Smith, MD, or to hyphenate it with her husband’s name, Mary Smith-Schmoe, MD. Joe might or might not make the same choice, and this is usually a matter of negotiation these days, at least in civilised society. These sort of hyphens are never optional, but required, despite the fact that many applications fail to accept hyphens (and many other characters) as legal characters in names.

Roughly the same situation exists for the nobility, except that the usual scheme was for a woman who married a man of lesser social status to retain her higher-status family name as part of a blended name, with the husband adopting the blended name as well. Which name comes first is often a matter of personal preference.

Likewise, some given names are hyphenated, like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jean-Paul Sartre, so if you’re ever in charge of designing an input field for names, don’t be a boor. Many people use ‘unexpected’ characters in their names, like José Feliciano or Já¼rgen Todenhá¶fer. It’s polite to let people do pretty much what they want to do with their own damned names, to say the least. ASCII character input fields may have made sense in ancient times, let’s say 1991, but ever since Unicode became an international standard, there’s little or no excuse to pretend that every modern computer doesn’t support every character used in every major language in the world.

Distinguishing Homophones

Just as in the original use of the hyphen, one major purpose of their use is to eliminate ambiguity concerning similar-sounding words, so resource, a supply of money, raw materials, or other assets can be easily distinguished from re-source, to find or acquire another supplier for a particular item or asset.

Conventions

Many words are strung together so often that they’ve acquired a meaning of their own, at very least slightly separate from the meaning of the individual words combined. As an example, hard-boiled can refer either to an egg or to a detective in a certain type of novel, although this is a very similar use to the tradition of distinguishing between substantive and attributive uses of the very same string of words.

Distinguishing attribution from substantiation

A woman who is thirty-four years old (an attributive use) can be described as a thirty-four-year-old (a substantive use). In general, when you make a string of adjectives into a noun, you’re often well-advised to glue the pieces together with hyphens.

Ambiguity

The manner in which we jam words together is often ambiguous, if you can’t actually hear the person creating the words, so we often tie certain words together with hyphens if they’d normally be strung together in speech. High-achieving students are a rather different matter to high achieving students.

The wine-dark seas of Homer (attributive) might either be described as wine dark (predicative) or as wine-dark, depending on how the speaker believes the words ought to be spoken and the exact usage of the words involved. Some words are inherently ambiguous without the context supplied by one or more associated words, so a safe cracker isn’t quite the same as a safe-cracker. The first might simply be gluten-free, whilst the second is more probably a felon.

Standards

Over time, some types of hyphenation are falling into disuse, especially in the UK and places influenced by UK usage. Most professional writing follows a style guide, and writers who make money at it typically pay close attention to whatever standards they’re expected to adhere to. Even in the self-publishing field, one of the more common criticisms made by reviewers is bad grammar, spelling, and general sloppiness, many of which have resulted in returns for credit. That’s the dark side of publishing for the Kindle or Nook or iPad, because that ‘sale’ that flows so easily from a few ‘clicks’ on the part of the reader can be just as easily reversed, as long as the retailer’s time limits haven’t been exceeded.

Style Guides

The most accessible is probably the Wikipedia version, which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AManual_of_Style It has the great advantage of being free for anyone to use.

The Associated Press Stylebook is very valuable for newspaper reporters and print publishers, because it pays attention to the requirements of print media, and so values space-saving conventions. The online version is available here by subscription: http://www.apstylebook.com/ or you can purchase the print version through any bookstore.

The Tameri Guide for Writers is available online here: http://www.tameri.com/edit/style.html It tracks the AP Stylebook fairly closely, but has the advantage of being available gratis.

The Modern Language Association Handbook is very popular for scholarly writers in the humanities, especially academic writers. It’s available online here: http://www.mlahandbook.org/ and one ‘purchases’ online access through purchasing a copy of the current printed book, all of which contain access codes.

The Guardian Styleguide is available online here: http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide There’s no charge for online use, although they also sell an updated printed version. It’s nice for UK usage.

The BBC News stylebook from a while back is available as a PDF here: http://www2.media.uoa.gr/lectures/linguistic_archives/academic_papers0506/notes/stylesheets_3.pdf They do have a more recent version available to people in the UK available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide but you’ll be intercepted unless you’re ‘local,’ the theory being that UK citizens have paid their license fees and are thus deserving of BBC largesse. On the other hand, About.com has a freely-available version here: URL Gobbledygook from About.com

In Canada, you might want to take an online look at The Canadian Style: http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/tcdnstyl/index-eng.html?lang=eng

You might also want to take a look at the famous The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

Strunk and White has its detractors, but few writers would ignore the overall thrust of the work. It’s well worth having, even if you use it as a source of arcane ‘rules’ that you’d personally prefer to flout.