Because there are no hard and fast rules for using hyphens, they have subsequently been overused, underused and misused.
Scratch around on the internet and you will find disagreement about the best way to use hyphens, even among the experts. It is not the only form of punctuation open to interpretation and debate – you’ll also find fervent discussions of commas and semi-colons – but because the hyphen is so fluid and flexible, it seems to cause more trouble than any other typographical mark.
I personally detest the dropping of hyphens where there is a double letter, for instance reenter and cooperation. If anyone tries to defend this, I offer up the word co-op. Try removing the hyphen from that and see where it gets you. And what about a word like re-creation?
The Americans are allergic to hyphens. It’s almost as though they began a post-war campaign to eradicate them. This ‘no hyphen’ policy is fine when the compound word is something like postwar, but when you’re talking pseudointellectualism or antidisestablishment the lack of a hyphen makes the word hard to read and a typesetting nightmare.
When taken to its terminus, the tendency to combine words also begins to fail the logic test. In many American novels now I see back seat written as backseat. (That no doubt stemmed from ‘back seat driver’, which only makes its use as a noun more ludicrous, but that’s another discussion.) By this rationale, front seat should be written frontseat. Why not? What makes the seat in the back of a car so special that it deserves a compound word? And if words commonly appearing next to each other is justification enough for turning them into a single word, where does it end? Toiletseat? Petrolstation? Galeforcewinds?
The flipside of this argument is that hyphen use can become addictive and therefore profligate. This is especially true of compound adjectives. Fully-booked concert, partially-eaten hamburger, black-and-white cow, Sydney-to-Melbourne Marathon – a case can be made to hyphenate all these phrases, but I would argue that you can remove them without creating any confusion as to their meaning. I particularly dislike the hyphenation of ‘black and white cow’, which makes the phrase harder, not easier, to read.
I must confess, however, to a weakness for compound adjectives in certain circumstances. There are many of these in the motoring world: six-speed transmission and four-cylinder engine for instance. I suppose you could write your way out of using a hyphen in all the above examples, but then it starts to sound waffly and self-important, like something out of a 19th century newspaper: The engine has four cylinders and it is mated to a transmission with six speeds.
So far, so nebulous and subjective, right? So what’s an author to do?
The best guide to hyphen usage I’ve ever encountered came from a fellow journalist. He had cut his teeth the old fashioned way – starting out as a cadet on a newspaper rather than getting a uni degree – and one of his mentors recommended only using a hyphen when leaving one out could result in confusion or a complete change of meaning. This approach, so far as I can tell, never fails.
Need an example where a hyphen, or lack thereof, can change the meaning of a sentence? Here is one I came up with while creating a style guide for the magazine I edit, Open Road:
I bought a box of five year-old wines.
I bought a box of five-year-old wines.
Ultimately, it’s the reader that matters. When you’re wondering whether or not to use a hyphen, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and then punctuate accordingly.
