Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

A Little Used Punctuation Mark

One of the most profound things ever said about punctuation came in an old style guide of the Oxford University Press in New York. “If you take hyphens seriously,” it said, “you will surely go mad.” And it’s true. Just look how the little blighter escaped all previous categorisation until I had to hunt it down on its own for this teeny-weeny, hooked-on, after-thought-y chapter. It’s a funny old mark, the hyphen. Always has been. People have argued for its abolition for years: Woodrow Wilson said the hyphen was “the most un-American thing in the world” (note the hyphen required in “un-American”); Churchill said hyphens were “a blemish, to be avoided wherever possible”. Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it’s not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. Phrases abound that cry out for hyphens. Those much-invoked examples of the little used car, the superfluous hair remover, the pickled herring merchant, the slow moving traffic and the two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would all be lost without it.

The name comes from the Greek, as usual. What a lot of words the Greeks had for explaining spatial relationships – for placing round, placing underneath, joining together, cutting off! Lucky for us, otherwise we would have had to call our punctuation marks names like “joiner” and “half a dash” and so on. In this case, the phrase from which we derive the name hyphen means “under one” or “into one” or “together”, so is possibly rather more sexy in its origins than we might otherwise have imagined from its utilitarian image today. Traditionally it joins together words, or words-with-prefixes, to aid understanding; it keeps certain other words neatly apart, with an identical intention. Thus the pickled-herring merchant can hold his head high, and the coat-tail doesn’t look like an unpronounceable single word. And all thanks to the humble hyphen.

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 dis-appearing, 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:

1 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” – care-fully 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 com-plain! 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.

2 It is still necessary to use hyphens when spelling out numbers, such as thirty-two, forty-nine.

3 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.

4 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.

5 Certain prefixes traditionally require hyphens: un-American, anti-Apartheid, pro-hyphens, quasi-grammatical.

6 When certain words are to be spelled out, it is customary to use hyphens to indicate that you want the letters enunciated (or pictured) separately: “K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M”.

7 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).

8 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”.

9 Hesitation and stammering are indicated by hyphens: “I reached for the w-w-w-watering can.”

10 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? Nichol-son 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”.

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.