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The Merciless Grammarian Spring 2010 / Columns

The Merciless Grammarian spews his wrath on nasty problems of grammar, mechanics, and style.

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Drawing by Nathan Baran Least Merciful of Grammarians: I’ve got to tell you: I got A’s on my papers in college, not least because they were beautifully punctuated. Now that I’m writing on the job, I find myself getting corrected for over-punctuating. Take hyphens, for example. In school I was taught to hyphenate multiple words that modify the same noun: fiveminute break, black-and-white television. My coworkers seem to be hyphenphobic, though, and tell me to get rid of them. Who’s right?

Caught in the middle, Linea Under-Singleton My Most Hyphenated Linea: Ah, what a difference a little line can make. Within the hallowed walls of academe, it is indeed common to hyphenate two or more words striving sideby-side to limit or describe a single noun, as you so ably demonstrate in your examples. Proponents of this practice cite the confusion that can arise when such a unit modifier, as it is betimes called, is not hyphenated, viz.

I have finally catalogued my broken glass collection.

Is this a collection of broken glass or a collection of drinking vessels that has met with an unfortunate accident? A hyphen would clarify the former reading and avoid the latter: I have finally catalogued my broken-glass collection.

That being said, the dear little hyphen is seldom to be found in much writing for the public sphere. The Associated Press, ever the enemy of the baroque and byzantine in mechanics, has gone so far as to stipulate “the fewer hyphens the better” (meanwhile, lament the loss of the comparative comma after hyphens).

While many style handbooks make an appeal for using hyphens to avoid ambiguity, it seems that the hyphen has become increasingly regarded as a punctuation mark to ignore rather than to look squarely in its tightly closed eye.

Writers in professional circles have followed suit, perhaps seeing a proliferation of hyphens as a sign of pedantic prissiness. Some could even make an appeal to “efficiency,” as if avoiding the hyphen would keep us from depleting our vital nonrenewable punctuation resources.

I therefore see no solution to your conundrum, Linea. Academics and academically inspired handbooks will continue to tout the hyphen while journalists and other writers on the job continue to spurn it. As much as I would fain ride into battle on my night-black steed to defend this horizontal episema against all comers, little can be gained by flaunting the expectations of one’s audience.

Bitter in defeat, The Merciless One ‹ Reaching In, Reaching Out: A Tale of Administrative Experimentation and the Process of Administrative Inclusion

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