Pylimitics

The message for to-day (which is the way “today” used to be written) is about hyphens. Using hyphens is a bit of a black art in English, and people have written many e-mails to publications criticizing this or that bit of hyphenation. There aren’t any rules. Or, really, there are rules, but they’re often contradictory. They’re written down and you can to find them in very specific places. What are those places? Well, nearly every time there’s a group of people (where a “group” is at least one person) responsible for publishing something in some manner, they adopt or create a style guide. I know; I’ve written a number of them. Style guides (like style-guides) are just rulebooks (or rule-books) for how we’re going to keep a set of documents consistent. It doesn’t really matter all that much whether you use e-mail or email (remember, there aren’t any rules), so to cope with that rule-free environment, more rules are created so that at least nobody encounters “email” and “e-mail” in the same place, thus creating a rules-based framework. There are, trust me, plenty of rules about hyphens. Except that there aren’t any rules.

As an aside, I should point out that obviously there’s no style guide in effect here.

In any case, hyphenization (hyphen-ization) is complicated, controversial, and in the right context, can be critical. Picture a business team trying to convince a venture capitalist to invest millions in their idea of a product. Their prospects would probably differ depending on their plans to market their product to twenty-five-year-olds or twenty five-year-olds. 

Although I keep saying there are no rules for hyphenation, you might say that there are, if you accept that rules can be loose and informal. If something is similar to a fish, it might be termed “fishlike.” If something is like a hippopotamus, it would more commonly “hippopotamus-like” (although I can’t claim that “common” would really apply very well there).  The difference is the length of the root word — English is largely a Germanic language, and the shorter a word is the more likely it is to be close to those Germanic roots. In Germanic languages there really is a rule: you can form new words by combining existing ones. So that’s what we do. But longer (more hippopotamus-like) words are more likely to be derived from Latin or Greek — languages where words are not combined Germanically (in a German-like way) — and so for longer words, we use hyphens. 

But remember, it’s loose and informal. You can make compound words from two adjectives, and those are usually hyphenated (“blue-green”). Two nouns are often kept separate (kitchen sink). If you have an adjective and a noun, it might depend on the order (“darkroom” is one word, while “sky-blue” is two). 

People argue about this all the time, of course. Not everybody — there’s a particular sort of person who argues about things like hyphens. You might call them nitpicky (whereupon some will object and point out that no, what you meant was “nit-picky”).

In some cases you can compare publications and see the differences in their style guides. If you read the Economist and the Atlantic magazines, you might notice differences such as “co-operate” versus “cooperate.” Some style guides actually delve into esthetics. Those that do would probably call for hyphens in compounds like “cooperate” and “archrival” simply because the hyphen breaks up what could be an ungainly or puzzling run of letters — the two “o”s in co-operate and “rchr” in arch-rival. Those style guides would probably be perfectly OK with cases like “nonaligned.” In fact, if arch-rival is hyphenated simply for esthetic reasons, then you might see “arch-rival” and “archangel” fairly close together — and you might, if you’re either nitpicky or nit-picky, fire off a complaining e-mail to the editor’s email address. 

Hyphenation (hyphen-ization) is made up on the fly more often than you might think, and usage is often simply up to the writer (and/or the editor, if there is one). In reality, where there’s an editor, then the writer’s role is simply to try to argue the case one way or the other. It’s also the writer’s role to lose arguments with editors. But hyphens can suddenly become important when you least expect it, whether you’re reporting on a third-world war or trying to sell a little-used car.