Friday February 22, 2008
Whither the hyphen?
By Dr LIM CHIN LAM
MY attention was recently drawn to the article ‘Is the hyphen facing extinction?’ by Giles Foden (Oct 19), which apparently was reproduced from Guardian News & Media.
There is much to be said about the hyphen, a mere punctuation mark represented by a short horizontal line, at mid-x level, connecting two (or more) words or parts of words. Far from being headed for extinction, the hyphen cannot be replaced, without loss of nuance or change of meaning, as in the following situations:
1) to connect the parts of a word divided, for lack of space, in a typewritten or printed line (as, for example, inspect- at the end of one line and ion at the beginning of the next line)
2) to connect the parts of a compound word (a free-for-all; a carrot-and-stick approach; an hour-by-hour account; a man-eating tiger; state-of-the-art technology)
3) to represent a speaker spelling out a word (as, for example, A-G-E-N-D-A)
4) to indicate hesitation in speech (I am not q-q-quite in agreement) or stammering/stuttering (You sh-sh-shouldn’t have d-d-done that)
5) to draw attention or give emphasis to a polysyllabic word used in conversation (as, for example, im-per-ti-nent)
6) to dispel uncertainty in spelling and meaning. For example, the insertion of a hyphen distinguishes between the two words in the following sets:
recover/re-cover, reform/re-form, remark/re-mark, reserve/re-serve; resign/re-sign.
Note other examples: one armed man (meaning “one man who is armed”) is different from one-armed man (meaning “man with one arm”); and man eating tiger is to be distinguished from man-eating tiger. There is a difference between sundry and sun-dry. In all these cases, a hyphen makes all the difference!
7) to make for definitive pronunciation. For example, it is easy to pronounce auto-immune, but not so with autoimmune, where the vowel pair -oi- might be pronounced as a diphthong.
Other examples: co-opt without the hyphen could possibly be pronounced as “coopt”; re-enter without the hyphen could be pronounced with two syllables, as in “reenter”, instead of with three syllables.
8) To avoid unusual vowel or consonant clusters. Lynne Truss, in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, (2003), cites de-ice (instead of deice) and shell-like (instead of shelllike) as examples where “the hyphen is used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic condition called ‘letter collision’.”
Other examples unlikely to be conflated are one-upmanship; one-off; one-to-one (or the US equivalent one-on-one).
Apart from the above instances, there is no hard-and-fast rule for the use of the hyphen in the writing of compound words. Many such words started with a hyphen (good-bye, lamp-post, text-book, to-day, to-morrow) but have now done away with the hyphen.
American English tends to carry this trend further (as, for example, antisocial rather than anti-social, laborsaving rather than labor-saving; nonconformist rather than non-conformist, troublefree rather than trouble-free)
I think I have made my point. Now let us consider some relevant examples. I previously noted in StarMetro (Oct 18) the following report:
“Restaurants are permitted to have a designated smoking area within the premises while there are no smoking restrictions in bars, discos and nightclubs.”
The report, as it stands, means that there are no restrictions on smoking whatsoever in bars, discos and nightclubs. The insertion of a hyphen to give the adjective no-smoking conveys a different meaning altogether.
I also noted a hilarious example from the Internet (quoted in New Straits Times/Life & Times, May 23, 2000), as follows:
“The ladies of the church have cast off clothes of every kind. They may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.”
I should have liked to go to that church on Friday afternoon to see the ladies cast off their clothes. Unfortunately, no such luck! The insertion of a hyphen, to convert the phrasal verb cast off to the compound adjective cast-off conveys an entirely different (and less salacious) meaning:
“The ladies of the church have cast-off clothes of every kind. They (i.e. the clothes, not the ladies as suggested in the unhyphenated instance above) may be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.”
Is the hyphen on the way out? I don’t think so.
Source:
RSS
