Most people ignore hyphens. Those who don\u2019t ignore them often misuse them.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark of punctuation or that employs it where it is not wanted,\u201d wrote the language scholar Wilson Follett.<\/p>\n
The writer-editor Theodore M. Bernstein was more sympathetic: \u201cThe world of the hyphen is anarchic. Such rules as there are tend to break down under the pressure of exceptions.\u201d<\/p>\n
No wonder the hyphen has been called \u201cthe pest of the punctuation family.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, if we did not need hyphens, they\u2019d be long gone. One of their chief functions is to serve as connectors in compound adjectives<\/strong>, which consist of two or more words. We see hyphens used this way all the time: an author who is well known is a well-known<\/em> author; an athlete who is out of shape is an out-of-shape<\/em> athlete.<\/p>\n To illustrate the indispensability of the humble hyphen in compound adjectives, we offer these examples from print and online media:<\/p>\n Hard to find plants at garden center<\/strong>\u00a0 The article that follows this headline has nothing but praise for a startup whose specialty is exotic vegetation, but two hyphens are needed in the opening phrase: hard-to-find plants<\/em>. Otherwise, the headline is deceptively negative: who wants to go to a nursery where it\u2019s hard to find any plants?<\/p>\n The drop in fee is $15<\/strong>\u00a0 It appears there was a fifteen-dollar drop in the price of admission to this event. On the contrary, the price of a ticket at the door\u2014that is, the drop-in<\/em> fee\u2014stayed firm at fifteen dollars. The writer subverted the sentence\u2019s meaning by leaving out the hyphen.<\/p>\n He drank a single malt scotch<\/strong>\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know scotch whisky from Scotch Tape you might suppose that the man limited himself to one drink of \u201cmalt scotch.\u201d But no, he was drinking a single-malt<\/em> scotch, and he consumed quite a few that evening.<\/p>\n No parking rules enacted<\/strong>\u00a0 As it stands, this headline says that no legislation was passed regarding public parking. But the article contradicts the headline: the city council issued an extensive list of no-parking<\/em> regulations, effective immediately.<\/p>\n A bomb survivor tells his story<\/strong>\u00a0 What a profound difference this missing hyphen makes. Anyone who survives a bomb has a harrowing story to tell, but this piece was about a man who survived the atomic bomb, also known as the A-bomb<\/em>, that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The anguish of surviving a bomb blast cannot be minimized, but even that pales in comparison with enduring the hellscape wrought by the most devastating weapon ever unleashed upon humankind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most people ignore hyphens. Those who don\u2019t ignore them often misuse them. \u201cNothing gives away the incompetent amateur more quickly than the typescript that neglects this mark of punctuation or that employs it where it is not wanted,\u201d wrote the language scholar Wilson Follett. The writer-editor Theodore M. Bernstein was more sympathetic: \u201cThe world of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adjectives-adverbs","category-hyphens"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}