Making a Point (25 page)

27

Hy-phens

Any book that set out to cover every eventuality in punctuation would be unpickupable. I've therefore focused on the general principles behind punctuation and how to deal with the problems that feature frequently in its use. It has taken me three chapters to explore just the main uses of the comma. If I were to cover
all
the ways in which the comma can be used, I would end up having to write an entire grammar of English from a punctuational perspective, as every construction has to be punctuated, and commas operate at all levels of syntactic organization. Similarly, if I were to cover all variations in the use of the hyphen, I would have to write an entire dictionary, because each compound word has its own story. It is the most unpredictable of marks. Henry Fowler sums it up well in the opening sentence of his entry on hyphens in his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
: ‘chaos'.

The hyphen has an ancient history (the name is from an Ancient Greek word meaning ‘together'), and the mark that it describes can be seen throughout the manuscript era in several functions, but usually to draw a reader's attention to the way words, or parts of words, separated through some accident (such as being unable to fit at the end of a line), needed to be brought together. In the sixteenth century, John Hart emphasized this linking role in his term for the hyphen: a ‘joiner'. Hyphens became increasingly common in print
from the 1570s, even though the term itself isn't recorded in English until the early 1600s.

We then see the hyphen becoming a standard feature of English orthography, with the same two broad functions that it has today: as a divider, to show a word-break at the end of a line, and as a linker, to mark the unity of a word containing distinct grammatical elements. But it took a while for a consistent practice to develop. It's clear from the way it is sprinkled around the publications of the Elizabethan period that there was a great deal of uncertainty over its use. For example, in Shakespeare's First Folio we see hyphens that we would never tolerate today, such as
for-sake
,
a-gaine
, and
yon-der
. And any word sequence that was felt to have a tight semantic link might be hyphenated, such as
red-plague
and
for her wealths-sake
.

With just two main functions to perform, we might expect hyphenation to be a straightforward matter. But repeatedly we see the usage pundits keeping their distance. Here is Ernest Gowers's elegant disclaimer: ‘If I attempted to lay down any rules I should certainly go astray, and give advice not seemly to be followed.' He is alluding to a style book written for Oxford University Press by John Benbow in which we read: ‘If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.'

Nonetheless – and allowing for this possibility – we do need to give hyphens some serious consideration, especially as both functions give rise to variation and change. The hyphen that identifies a word-break at the end of a line is the easier matter to deal with. It presents few problems once we recognize that it's located at a syllable boundary and not after a syllable fragment. Monosyllabic words are straightforward: they are never broken. We don't see
str-ing
or
go-ne
. (The convention isn't self-evident, as is shown by the way children make such breaks when writing their first stories. It has to be taught.) The only usage issue relates to differences between
British and American practice over polysyllabic words.

British practice is to follow the way a word divides grammatically or etymologically; American practice is to follow the way the word sounds. So if we see
bio-graphy
and
philosophy
, we can guess we are reading a British book following Hart's original rules; if
biog-raphy
and
philos-ophy
, it must be American (as in Webster's dictionaries) – though during the twentieth century some British dictionaries began to follow US practice, especially those aimed at a foreign learners' market. The issue was never serious, as most words divide in the same way (both principles would show
pun-ish
, for example) – and in any case it's largely of historic interest now, as we hardly ever see hyphenated line-breaks today, thanks to sophisticated typesetting on paper and software-governed typesetting on screen.

Word division at line-endings never bothered the usage pundits much, except when it gave rise to a facetious miscue (such as
the-rapists
). They left such matters to the printers. Henry Fowler devotes five pages in his
Dictionary
to examples of correct and incorrect hyphenation, and doesn't mention line-breaks at all. He, as everyone else, was entirely focused on the way hyphens are to be used, or not used, in word identification, where there are two central issues. Do we use a hyphen to separate the elements in a compound word? And do we use one to separate a prefix from the rest of the word?

There are three options if we decide to bring two (or more) elements together to make a compound word. We can write
flower pot
(spaced),
flower-pot
(hyphenated), or
flowerpot
(solid). These are the choices, bringing together two levels in the punctuation hierarchy: the word space and the hyphen. They are now in competition with each other. To space or not to space? That is the question. And if we decide on the latter: to hyphenate or not to hyphenate?

Most writers have no idea. They may have an instinctive preference or a long-standing habit for writing a word in a particular way, but they know that their choice may not be shared by other writers. And instinct never guarantees consistency. That's one of the reasons publishers employ copy-editors: they will check that a writer has hyphenated consistently and in accordance with the publishing-house style. And because publishers make different decisions over which words should be hyphenated, authors – especially those who have written for a variety of houses – are not going to have a clear intuition about what to do, and will generally be happy to leave that to the editors.

Even if you've spent the whole of your authorial or journalistic life with a single publisher, your intuition may let you down. This is because there are two factors influencing publishing practice: tradition, which fosters a firm's identity, and language change, which affects everyone. The concern for identity that we saw in the case of the serial comma is seen again here. British publishers opt for the hyphen much more than American houses do. Canadian and Australian publishers sometimes follow British practice, sometimes American. And within a country, there may be various policies. Oxford and Cambridge style guides make different decisions, for example. I normally write
no-one
. When in 2008 I put this in a book for CUP, the copy-editor changed it to
no one
. When in the same year I put
no one
in a book for OUP the copy-editor changed it to
no-one
. And changing language fashions can create havoc with style guides. In a later book for OUP my
no-one
was changed to
no one
.

Changes in fashion are the main reason why the obvious solution to any question about hyphenation – look it up in a dictionary! – won't always help. Look up
flower-pot
in the online
Oxford English Dictionary
and you'll see the heading:
flower-pot | flowerpot
, without further comment. It's left up to you. And if you were in the habit of using the
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
, and had internalized its recommendations, you would have had a real shock in 2007, when the sixth edition was published and you saw that around 16,000 items had had their hyphens removed. Most of the changes had the hyphen replaced by a solid setting (
pigeon-hole > pigeonhole
,
cry-baby > crybaby
,
bumble-bee > bumblebee
), but quite a few ended up spaced (
test-tube > test tube
,
ice-cream > ice cream
,
hobby-horse > hobby horse
). Reactions ranged from the hysterical to the bemused. Some observers called it ‘hyphengate'.

Why did the editors do this? They are partly reflecting changes in fashion. The chief editor, Angus Stevenson, commented at the time that the dictionary is reflecting the current dislike of the hyphen on the part of designers: ‘The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned.' And indeed, his view is reflected across the dictionary world. Certainly, most people would agree that there's something clean and modern about the first of the following alternatives (6th edition) compared with the conservative appearance of the second (5th edition):

If you buy too much ice cream with your pin money you'll end up with a pot belly.

If you buy too much ice-cream with your pin-money you'll end up with a pot-belly.

Apart from anything else, it's far easier to type the first version in the fast-moving Internet world. The position of the hyphen on a keyboard doesn't help.

But there's more to it than the pragmatic factors of fashion, aesthetics, and ergonomics. We still have to explain why some words have ended up spaced and some have
ended up solid. Why is it
ice cream
and not
icecream
? And why
bumblebee
and not
bumble bee
? We might imagine it would be even faster to leave the space out. The reasons are all to do with semantics – the ease with which we visually perceive the meaning and the familiarity we have with the concept.

Legibility is affected when unfamiliar sequences of letters come before the eye, or the letter-sequence distracts us by making us think of an irrelevant word. So, for example, we are unlikely to find
arrowworm
or
lookingglass
because of the unfamiliar juxtaposition of the middle consonants, and both of these are indeed spaced in the new
Shorter Oxford
. Similarly, pairs of vowels can cause momentary uncertainty, so we are less likely to encounter
deicer
,
moreish
,
goahead
, or
toing and froing
, and never
antiinflation
,
belllike
, or
freeenterprise
. Irrelevant associations arise if we were to write
weeknight
,
wall-eyed
, and
tearoom
. Length can also be a factor. Readers don't like short elements (less than three letters), so when email first arrived it was spelled
e-mail
– never
e mail
. Similarly we see
U-turns
and
H-bombs
. Compounds that become lengthy (around ten letters or more) also prompt separation – so
commonsense
,
goodlooking
, and
backprojection
are often avoided. And we see a hyphen routinely when the typography is unusual, such as when the base of the word begins with a capital letter (
pro-English
), a numeral (
post-2000
), or a punctuation mark (
un-‘hip'
).

But note the qualifications – ‘usually', ‘less likely', ‘unlikely', ‘often', ‘routinely'. These are tendencies, not rules. And any of these tendencies can be overruled by the factor of familiarity, which explains a great deal of the variation in the history of hyphenation. A compound word is a semantic unit as well as a grammatical one: the meaning of the whole is different from the sum of the parts. But it takes time for the meaning of a new compound to become familiar, and this is
reflected in changes in orthographic practice, as shown by looking at the historical citations in the
OED
. Typically, the first recorded examples are spaced: the two elements retain a trace of their separate identities. Then, as people get used to the new concept, we find the compound hyphenated as well as spaced. And eventually, once the original meanings have been lost sight of, we see it written solid. So, for example, we find
pigeon holes
in the sixteenth century,
pigeon-holes
predominating in the seventeenth, and
pigeonholes
growing in frequency in the twentieth. ‘For sale: a type writing machine', says an ad in 1881, and soon after we get
type-writing
and then
typewriting
. As email became more familiar, it began to drop its hyphen, and
email
is now the most common form. Again, the underlying principle is a trend, not a hard-and-fast rule; but it makes sense. And it explains why it's necessary, every now and then, for a dictionary to change its recommendations. It is simply trying to reflect the new ways in which people are thinking of the words.

Here's a more detailed example of the way practices change. It's standard now to spell
today
,
tomorrow
, and
tonight
without a space or hyphen. But when the words first arrived in Old and Middle English they were seen as a combination of preposition
to
followed by a separate word (
dæg
,
morwen
,
niht
), so they were spaced. This usage was reinforced by Dr Johnson, who listed them as
to day
etc in his
Dictionary
(1755). But people began to think differently in the nineteenth century, and we see the big new dictionaries (such as Worcester's and Webster's) hyphenating the words. People began to get fed-up with this in the twentieth century. Henry Fowler came out against it in his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926):

The lingering of the hyphen, which is still usual after the
to
of these words, is a very singular piece of conservatism.

He blames printers for its retention, in a typical piece of Fowlerish irony:

it is probably true that few people in writing ever dream of inserting the hyphen, its omission being corrected every time by those who profess the mystery of printing.

‘Lingering' was right. In fact we see instances of the hyphenated form right into the 1980s. In
Postman Pat's Thirsty Day
(1984), we read:

‘It's a real scorcher to-day,' said Pat to Jess, as they drove along.