Hyphen Hi-Jinks
Is there a hyphen in there?
Just kidding about the title—hijinks is one word. And it means antics, buffoonery, capers, pranks, tomfoolery, and rough housing. Wait—should that be rough-housing? Nah, it’s roughhousing.
If you think the hardest thing in publishing is landing an agent, how about figuring out those darn hyphens? I can report that just last week, hyphens even gave Track Changes a hard time—when I clicked on Accept all changes, the software did what it should, except it rejected every hyphen inserted by my copyeditor!
Being old school, I’ve always prided myself on my grammar. I was raised in the British system, with old-school teachers and old school teachers aplenty. So imagine my disbelief when I discovered I had a hyphen problem. As in, when something looked like it needed a hyphen, I just stuck in a hyphen. That was a wrong-headed approach. (Wrongheaded? Possibly, but definitely not wrong headed.)
Take, for example, the word good-looking. An innocent oft-used word, which gets more hyphen abuse than one may think. This is an excellent place to insert my husband, because he is so darn good looking! Please note, no hyphen. If you argue with me, I’ll drag him into the room, mount him on a pedestal, and insist that Exhibit A here is one good-looking hunk. Note that he just acquired a hyphen. The rule is adjective + participle is hyphenated before a noun, but not after it. Got it?
Now try these. My protagonist carries out many of her nefarious deeds in poorly lit hallways; but she lectures in well lit rooms. The situation in both these cases is adverb + adjective before a noun. Hyphenated or not? The answer is: It depends. If the adverb ends in “ly” there is no hyphen, otherwise, insert a hyphen. Therefore, we have poorly lit hallways but well-lit rooms. Don’t forget, however, that the hallways are poorly lit and the room is well lit—no hyphens—if they don’t explicitly precede a noun.
Are you feeling good about your newly acquired hyphen expertise?
Keep reading!
The dodgy lodger in my novel has a cherry wood desk in his room. Well, “cherry” isn’t an adverb, it’s an adjective that describes the adjective “wood.” So what now? It turns out that compound adjectives get hyphenated too, except when they don’t.
He has a cherry-wood desk.
No, I’m sure, it’s definitely cherry wood.
So the rule is: adjective + adjective is hyphenated if it comes before a noun, but not hyphenated if there’s no noun.
My protagonist, Madeline, plans to meet the villain at seven thirty with no hyphen. He, however, will be on the six-thirty train. She will give chase on the eight o’clock bus.
Madeline is brilliant at problem solving. To be honest, she is a problem-solving machine. Do you see the pattern now? She is clearly Type A. Definitely a Type A personality. Hey wait! Shouldn’t there be a hyphen in the preceding sentence? No, dear reader. A noun + enumerator (letter or number) is never hyphenated. I would describe Madeline as a philosopher queen. She definitely has a philosopher-queen personality. Are the previous two sentences correct? The answer is no! The phrase philosopher-queen is always hyphenated, irrespective of its placement in a sentence. Noun + unrelated noun, is an exception and destroys the natural order of things.
Continuing with Madeline. She’s on a tenure track, namely, she has a tenure-track position. Based on the preceding paragraph, shouldn’t “tenure track” always be hyphenated? You know, a noun + noun? The answer is no, because a noun + noun in which the first noun modifies the second, is not the same as two unrelated nouns. Take that! Student nurse? Not hyphenated. Singer-songwriter? Needs that hyphen!
Madeline does a lot of things by halves: she half-runs on her gammy leg, half-whispers in the dark, half-drags her dog to the car. Here’s another nice compound verb: When a good-looking guy asks her to work with him, she gives a shoulder-shrug of assent. Then she speed-types on her computer. She goes all out to impress him, an all-out effort. She never becomes a burned-out programmer, even though many of her colleagues are burned out. She’s rewarded with a 5 percent increase, which has no hyphen (percent rule). She is self-conscious about her height, whereas her short boyfriend is totally unselfconscious about his.
All these rules I’ve been spouting come from the Chicago Manual of Style. You could say I’ve been using Chicago style, namely, Chicago-style rules.
When Madeline wakes up in hospital after an accident, the walls are puke green. The last thing she needs is a puke-green wall. The detective who visits is computer literate, a truly computer-literate woman. In the evening, Madeline watches a movie about a small-state senator. Please note that the man in question is a beefy six-foot-seven football player, but his state is Maine, a small state. If he were skinny and five feet tall and his state were Any-State, USA, we’d call him a small state senator. Holy hyphens!
This hyphen talk is becoming tedious, so I’ll end with some bits and pieces, where the rule seems to be “The dictionary says so.”
Madeline is a stick-in-the-mud and her idea is a flash in the pan.
Disease A is waterborne, but Disease B is food-borne.
This is a cross section, but that is a cross-reference.
Here is the president-elect, but there is the vice president elect.
There is my half sister, who is half-asleep. (Controversial! Half sister seems to be hyphenated everywhere in the world except the Chicago Manual of Style.)
She has a childlike demeanor and a bell-like voice.
On my website I see a web-page.
Antihero but anti-inflammatory.
Coauther but co-opt.
Fourfold but twenty-four-fold.
Megavitamin but mega-annoyance.
Midcareer but mid-July.
A neonate but a neo-Nazi.
He is a nonviolent, non-beer-drinking man.
Postdoctoral but post-Vietnam.
Premodern but Pre-Raphaelite.
Finally, an existential question about the quality of my so-called life, or Why did hyphens merit a four-page rant?
Because conquering hyphens in my novel was a one-week-long crusade, a pain-in-the-buttress undertaking, a hate-my-copyeditor fever dream. Out, out, damned hyphen!