Those were the days of hot lead and picas. A typesetter would actually have to move the g manually down to the next line to achieve this unpopular effect. When we moved to cold type, in the early eighties, at first the computer didn’t know how to break words. “Bedroom” would be hyphenated “bedroom.” Somebody has since fed the computer an entire dictionary, complete with word breaks, and given copy editors the ability to hyphenate words by themselves. I simply put my cursor between the n and the g and hit option-shift-hyphen, and have my way with “English.” But the language is propagating faster than technology can keep up with it. In the New York Times, I have seen “retweet” (retweet) and “jughandle” (jughandle, as in New Jersey’s famous left-hand turns from the right-hand lane) and “Toscaesque” (Toscaesque; that will teach you to make operatic references). As long as print is justified, there will be a place for humans in this business.
Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise. Once, in a piece that was about to go to press, I noticed that the word “cashier” was broken “cashier.” Curious because “cashier” seemed obvious, I looked it up and found that Webster’s has two distinct entries: “cashier,” a transitive verb, meaning “to dismiss from service,” especially “to dismiss dishonorably,” with the synonyms “reject, discard”; and “cashier,” a noun, meaning “one that has charge of money.” (My first ambition was to be a cashier—I thought you got to keep all the money.) The computer, not knowing the difference between “cashier” the verb and “cashier” the noun, had chosen the first option.
It happened again with the word “bumper”: it was broken “bum-per.” Who doesn’t know that the word “bumper” breaks after the “bump”? Back to the dictionary: The first entry for “bumper” is indeed “bum-per,” a noun that means “a brimming cup or glass.” I’ll have a bumper of your finest IPA, my good man. The second sense, also divided “bum-per,” is an adjective meaning “unusually large,” as in “bumper crop.” Finally, the third sense is rendered “bump-er,” a noun, meaning “one that bumps” or “a device for absorbing shock or preventing damage (as in collision); specif: a bar at either end of an automobile.” Ah! So the computer, regurgitating the dictionary, did not make it down to the form of the word in which er is a suffix. I moved my cursor between the p and the e and hit option-shift-hyphen. I am ever on the alert for bumpers and cashiers.
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The hyphen leads a double life: it is used not just to break words into syllables but to tie two or more words together, in the formation of compounds. Here are three compounds: school bus, bus driver, school-bus driver. This is one of the simpler uses of the hyphen, turning compound nouns into adjectives. You could also have “bus-driver hero.” “Ice cream” is two words as a noun and hyphenated as an adjective in “ice-cream cone” or “ice-cream sandwich.” You can get carried away with hyphens: putting them in, taking them out, putting them back in again. When I took a copy-editing test, I agonized over whether or not to put a hyphen in the phrase “bright red car.” Did “bright” modify the shade of red or the car? I put it in, I took it out, put it in, took it out. Only when I had taken the hyphen out and turned the test in did it become clear to me that I should have put the hyphen in. The car was bright red. It was a bright-red car.
There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens. The laughing hyphena. When I was learning my way around on the copydesk, I noted the two schools of hyphenation: Eleanor Gould seemed to hyphenate everything, and Lu Burke hated anything extra. Lu taught me to do without hyphens when a word is in quotation marks, unless the word is always hyphenated; the quotation marks alone hold the words together, and it would be overkill to link them with a hyphen as well. (Capital letters and italics work the same way.) Eleanor once mystified me by putting a hyphen in “blue stained glass” to make it “blue-stained glass.” When I asked her about it, she took on an oracular look, and allowed that it was a difficult concept. I had the impression that I would never grasp it. Is it stained glass that is blue? Or glass that is blue-stained? The answer would seem to be: both. If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.