Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [47]
Purely for expediency, the hyphen is used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic condition called “letter collision”. However much you might want to create compound words, there will always be some ghastly results, such as “deice” (de-ice) or “shelllike” (shell-like).
One of the main uses of the hyphen, of course, is to indicate that a word is unfinished and continues on the next line. Ignorance about where to split words has reached quite scary proportions, but thankfully this isn’t the place to go into it. I’ll just say that it’s “pains-]taking” and not “pain-]staking”.
Hesitation and stammering are indicated by hyphens: “I reached for the w-w-w-watering can.”
When a hyphenated phrase is coming up, and you are qualifying it beforehand, it is necessary to write, “He was a two- or three-year-old.”
Even bearing all these rules in mind, however, one can’t help feeling that the hyphen is for the chop. Fowler’s Modern English Usage as far back as 1930 was advising that, “wherever reasonable”, the hyphen should be dropped, and the 2003 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English suggests that it is heading for extinction. American usage is gung-ho for compound words (or should that be gungho?), but a state of confusion reigns these days, with quite psychotic hyphenations arising in British usage, especially the rise of hyphens in phrasal verbs. “Time to top-up that pension,” the advertisements tell us. Uneducated football writers will aver that the game “kicked-off” at 3pm, and are not, apparently, ticked off afterwards. On the Times books website I see that Joan Smith “rounds-up” the latest crime fiction. But what if a writer wants his hyphens and can make a case for them? Nicholson Baker in his book The Size of Thoughts writes about his own deliberations when a well-intentioned copy-editor deleted about two hundred “innocent tinkertoy hyphens” in the manuscript of one of his books. American copy-editing, he says, has fallen into a state of “demoralised confusion” over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds. On this occasion he wrote “stet hyphen” (let the hyphen stand) so many times in the margin that, in the end, he abbreviated it to “SH”.
I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted re-enter (rather than reenter), post-doc (rather than postdoc), foot-pedal (rather than foot pedal), second-hand (rather than secondhand), twist-tie (rather than twist tie), and pleasure-nubbins (rather than pleasure nubbins).
It is probably better not to inquire what “pleasure-nubbins” refers to here, incidentally, while still defending Baker’s right to hyphenate his pleasure-nubbins – yes, even all day, if he wants to.
In the end, hyphen usage is just a big bloody mess and is likely to get messier. When you consider that fifty years ago it was correct to hyphenate Oxford Street as “Oxford-street”, or “tomorrow” as “to-morrow”, you can’t help feeling that prayer for eventual light-in-our-darkness may be the only sane course of action. Interestingly, Kingsley Amis says that those who smugly object to the hyphenation of the phrase “fine tooth-comb” are quite wrong to assert the phrase ought really to be punctuated “fine-tooth comb”. Evidently there really used to be a kind of comb called a tooth-comb, and you could buy it in varieties of fineness. Isn’t it a relief to know that? You learn something new every day.
* * *
Merely Conventional Signs
On page 33 of the first-edition copy of Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point There that I have before me as I write (I borrowed it from the University of London Library), there is a marginal note made by a reader long ago. A marginal note? Yes, and I have been back to check and muse on it several times. Partridge, who is just about to elucidate the 17th application of the comma (“Commas in Fully Developed Complex Sentences”), is explaining that in this particular case it is difficult to formulate a set of rigid rules. “My aim