Hyphens Can Be Your Friend

or your enemy. I’m fairly fastidious about this (as I am with apostrophes), and I no doubt annoy many people whose stuff I edit. As the piece points out, the purpose of a hyphen is to disambiguate adjectives, so you can tell for sure what is modifying what. For instance, “a light red fox” could be an underweight red fox, but “light-red fox” indicates that it is a fox (of indeterminate subspecies) that is light red in color. The exception is if the first word is an adverb, such as “lightly colored fox,” in which case the hyphen and connection of the two words is implicit.

That is all.

8 thoughts on “Hyphens Can Be Your Friend”

  1. There’s a great scene in some 70s or 80s movie (I don’t remember title) in which two little old ladies are playing scrabble and they have a conversation about whether m***** f***** is hyphenated or not. Completely irrelevant to the hyphenation lesson here, but since it came to mind, I thought I’d better let the internet know.

  2. Chris, it’s hard to tell. If the last two letters of the second word are “er,” then probably not, because it wouldn’t be a proper way to modify a noun. If it had one more letter and ended in “ing,” though, it would be a possibility.

  3. or instance, “a light red fox” could be an underweight red fox, but “light-red fox” indicates that it is a fox (of indeterminate subspecies) that is light red in color.

    Eh, I don’t use adjectives that way. A “light, red fox” is an underweight red fox. A “light red fox” is a fox of a light red color. No hyphen needed.

    As to the article, they seem to use hyphens with adjectives when an entire phrase is an adjective such as “a face-to-face meeting with this-was-unexpected economists.”

  4. Isn’t it interesting that a well-argued case becomes merely well argued, when it shifts from one side of the verb to the other.

    What a great language.

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