Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [46]
The fate of the hyphen is of course implicated in a general change occurring in the language at the moment, which will be discussed in the next chapter: the astonishing and quite dangerous drift back to the scriptio continua of the ancient world, by which words are just hoicked together as “all one word” with no initial capitals or helpful punctuation – the only good result of which being that if books manage to survive more than the next twenty years or so, younger readers will have no trouble reading James Joyce, since unhyphenated poetic compounds like “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening” will look perfectly everyday. Email addresses are inuring us to this trend, as are advertisements on the internet (“GENTSROLEXWATCH!”), and when I received an invitation to a BBC launch for an initiative called “soundstart”, I hardly blinked an eye. In the old days, we used to ask the following question a lot: “One word? Two words? Hyphenated?” With astonishing speed, the third alternative is just disappearing, and I have heard that people with double-barrelled names are simply unable to get the concept across these days, because so few people on the other end of a telephone know what a hyphen is. As a consequence they receive credit cards printed with the name “Anthony Armstrong, Jones”, “Anthony Armstrong’Jones”, or even “Anthony Armstrong Hyphen”.
Where should hyphens still go, before we sink into a depressing world that writes, “Hellohowareyouwhatisthisspacebarthingforanyidea”? Well, there are many legitimate uses for the hyphen:
To prevent people casting aspersions at herring merchants who have never touched a drop in their lives. Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity: words such as “co-respondent”, “re-formed”, “re-mark”. A re-formed rock band is quite different from a reformed one. Likewise, a long-standing friend is different from a long standing one. A cross-section of the public is quite different from a cross section of the public. And one could go on. Carefully placed hyphens do not always save the day, however, as I recently had good reason to learn. Writing in The Daily Telegraph about the state of modern punctuation, I alluded to a “newspaper style-book” – carefully adding the hyphen to ensure the meaning was clear (I wasn’t sure people had heard of style books). And can you believe it? Two people wrote to complain! I had hyphenated wrongly, they said (with glee). Since there was no such thing as a newspaper style-book, I must really have intended “newspaper-style book”. I’ll just say here and now that I’ve rarely been more affronted. “What is a newspaper-style book, then?” I yelled. “Tell me what a newspaper-style book would look like when it’s at home!” I still have not got over this.
It is still necessary to use hyphens when spelling out numbers, such as thirty-two, forty-nine.
When linking nouns with nouns, such as the London-Brighton train; also adjectives with adjectives: American-French relations. Typesetters and publishers use a short dash, known as an en-rule, for this function.
Though it is less rigorously applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless steel” is used to qualify another noun, it is hyphenated, as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement. Tom Jones was written in the 18th century, but is an 18th-century novel. The train leaves at seven o’clock; it is the seven-o’clock train.
Certain prefixes traditionally require hyphens: un-American, anti-Apartheid, pro-hyphens, quasi-grammatical.
When certain words