Thursday, January 13, 2005

724 Hyphen happy editors

Today's American English writing standards require far fewer commas than when I was in school. Even when I wrote for my professional journals in the 1990s, the editors would always chop away at my commas. However, someone took those commas from the punctuation dump, whacked them around a little bit and retooled them into hyphens. The Wall Street Journal is quite vigorous about recycling commas into hyphens. Today I found in the International section:

far-reaching; ground-level; Soviet-era; free-market; Stalin-era; second-term; oil-rich; two-thirds; joint-venture; foreign-investment; often-ambivalent; watered-down; market-opening; mid-1980s; low-end; and Congress party-led.

On the technology page I found home-page restoration and tracking-cookie detection. The Op-Ed page included war-torn; import-hungry; record-breaking; and current-account in a three sentence paragraph. Or, as the WSJ would edit, "a three-sentence paragraph." When I got to the Money and Investment page I found health-care; continuing-education; credit-card; cost-cutter; waste-cutting; cost-saving; one-time; light-speed; business-related; and more-rigorous.

I thought I had figured out that hyphens were inserted to make a few nouns and adjectives that were clinging to each other into a single adjective, but upon careful reading, I discovered many inconsistencies. I propose an idea. Perhaps it is our German genes coming to the fore. In our cell memory (and about 1/3 of Americans can trace their ancestory to that part of Europe) we want to experience very-long, impossible-to-pronouce nouns. If you've got a better theory, I'm will to listen--just don't hyphenate it.

1 comment:

Anvilcloud said...

The language always changes; doesn't it? I will think that I've hyphenated two words as they should be, but dictionary.com will tell me otherwise. Maybe they just aren't up to date. Some of these make sense to me: record-breaking temperatures, for example. However, I can't find any consistency. To a large extent some commas have just disappeared: the ones after beginning prepositional phrases, for example, or the Oxford comma, or the one between two principle clauses joined by a conjunction. I'm starting to do what I want when I want. Nobody really knows the difference anyway.