Hyphen Nation

We love commercial copywriting. Spinning witty web taglines out of inauspicious indices and fashioning propitious paragraphs from maudlin prose is our bread and butter at Yorkshire’s Tight Jeans and Jelly Shoes.

We thrive on weaving assonance and eloquence in each and every reference. Our homophones have overtones so subtle they elude reproach. Compound adjectival phrases, a leap of faith across the pages, collocation and pronunciation, articulation and punctuation. (Sorry we digress).

There are a number of basic rules which govern commercial copywriting as with any sort of writing that is intended to be read and understood. You’ve got to ensure that your grammar and punctuation are spot on so that people can easily apprehend your meaning and derive the impression you intend them to derive from what you’ve written.

Standard punctuation allows copywriters a certain amount of freedom to stylise their prose. Separating a list of items with semi colons instead of commas for example, or using a colon instead of a comma within a sentence enables you to either elevate the tone or create dramatic tension.

In general however, rules are rules and if you want to be clearly understood by your readers you need to use standard punctuation in a commonly accepted way.

There’s only really one punctuative character which divides copywriters, editors and readers across the English speaking world in terms of its correct usage, and that’s the humble hyphen.

This little black bar of contention first entered Western literature around the middle of the 15th century when German printers began using a new type of print press. The new technology required the printers to create a uniform number of lines of text on each page, and for each line of text to be of an identical length.

If a line break occurred in the middle of a word when they divided text into lines of equal length, the German printers would insert a hyphen as the last character in the row to indicate that the word was carried over to the next line. This practice is one which continues to be used in modern day printing in both books and newspapers.

Over the centuries, copywriters and publishers also began to use the character as a means of dividing the syllables of a word¹ or joining words which can be understood separately to form compound nouns or adjectives².

The purpose of the hyphen in both of these cases was to aid the reader’s understanding of the text and to prevent them from confusing the author’s intended meaning.

¹‘co-worker’ or ‘re-creation’ which would otherwise be read as coworker (which looks odd) or recreation (which has a totally different meaning).
²‘house-wife’ ‘walking-stick’ ‘check-in’ ‘state-of-the-art’ ‘mother-of-pearl’

Since the 1960s there has been a significant decline in the use of hyphens for the latter purpose. Compound nouns like ‘house-wife’ and ‘walking-stick’ are now so commonly used and understood that a hyphen is no longer required to prevent confusion. Words like these are now often run together like ‘housewife’, or left as two separate words like ‘walking stick’.

In the sixth edition of the shorter Oxford English Dictionary for instance, which was published in the summer of this year, 16,000 hyphens have been dispensed with. Words like pot-belly, ice-cream and fig-leaf are now two words while pigeon-hole, leap-frog, chick-pea and log-jam are one.

And why the devil not if there’s no danger of confusing or misleading the reader? If you started taking hyphens too seriously you’d have them everywhere before you knew it, and this might get little taxing on the eye³.

³The night-before-last my mother-in-law visited an old-fashioned, anglo-french chop-house with green-blue wall-paper for a candle-lit pre-theatre meal. The state-of-the-art dining-room was laid-out beautifully with lace-edged table-cloths on each dining-table and lily-of-the-valley in a flower-pot on the book-case in the left-hand corner.

Another reason for the demise of the hyphen to the great chagrin of the purists, is down to our increased use of text message and e-mail. In our desire to dash off quick fingered missives to friends, colleagues and loved ones we tend to view the hyphen as an unnecessary encumbrance, particularly when our meaning is already abundantly clear.

Take the word e-mail itself, few people nowadays even bother to hyphenate it. And why should they? It’s not as if mass confusion is going to ensue if they don’t. Unless the actual meaning or clarity of the text is being compromised, I think it’s fairly safe for us to keep our hyphens to ourselves.