Talk:Hyphen
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The current example of an adjective-adjective compound adjective (heh heh) is no good: truly remarkable progress. But truly is an adverb. I have removed the example but don't have a replacement in mind.
Nouns formed of a noun and an adjective are frequently hyphenated, as death-wish - which of those is the adjective? They both look like nouns to me. -- Zoe
I agree. Maybe if I get my thoughts on this collected, I'll work on it. Michael Hardy 00:58 Apr 27, 2003 (UTC)
This is a very well-written article. It contains an excellent exposition of the vagaries of hyphenation. However, I'd like to suggest some reworking of this article to reduce what appears to be some degree of bias. It seems to me that the content of this article falls into two categories: (1) an excellent description of the grammatically correct ('proper') usage of hyphens, with a variety of helpful examples, and (2) opinion on 'improper' (that is, grammatically incorrect) hyphenation in present-day writing.
As English is a living, evolving language, a discussion of the historical and current usage of hyphens is an interesting and relevant addition to the article, however the content from the current version of the article that might fall into this category seems to be biased towards so-called 'proper' hyphenation. I can't pretend to be an expert in such things, but this seems to be at odds with the present-day usage of hyphens, which appears to tend more to convention than to hard-and-fast rules. For example, "chocolate ice cream" is typically written without the hyphen, perhaps because it is assumed that everybody knows we are talking about a frozen, dairy-based dessert with a chocolate flavour, rather than cream containing some form of chocolate ice? This assumption does not seem to be entirely unreasonable.
- "Chocolate ice cream" is an open compound noun (ice cream) and an adjective (chocolate). If it were cream made of chocolate ice, like you said, it would most certainly be hyphenated, but since it is "ice cream" of the chocolate variety, no hyphen is necessary. Some of the same issues come to play here that are often seen in the difference between commas use with cumulative and cooridiante adjectives; we can be fairly sure that "ice" is not properly an adjective because one would not say "ice chocoalte cream."
It does seem like a good idea to make a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive rules for hyphens--Smallwhitelight 21:22, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps the simplest approach is to begin by dividing the current version of the article into two sections: (1) a description of grammatically correct hyphenation, and (2) a description of the current usage of hyphens, and more generally, the history of the humble hyphen. Might that make it clearer where, exactly, the article may need to have its neutrality improved?
--Ben Cairns 04:35 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Should the list of proper usage examples (the one that currently begins "text-only...") be wikified? -Smack 02:31, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)
An edition of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary that was published in the early 80s (I think) contained a punctuation guide which described the "double hyphen," something I've never seen described or even mentioned anywhere else. The glyph looked like a shortened equals sign, slightly tilted so it ran southwest-northeast. It was to be used when a hyphenated word needed to be broken at the end of the line at the hyphen (like "present-day," with "day" starting a new line).
Has anyone else ever heard of such a beast? Would it be worthy of adding to this article? --TobyRush 15:47, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
- I've never heard of it, but something like that would be useful when a URL is presented in printed text, especially in a newspaper or magazine with narrow columns. Some URLs contain hyphens, so the necessity of breaking a URL between two lines creates ambiguity if a hyphen is inserted. JamesMLane 07:34, 9 May 2005 (UTC)