Eleanor was also a judicious withholder of hyphens. It was her judgment that a “nuclear power plant” did not call for a hyphen, because it was both a power plant that happened to be nuclear and a plant that supplied nuclear power. There are other compounds that are not quite as double-jointed as nuclear power plants, but that still tempt people to put unnecessary hyphens in them. For example, “high blood pressure.” You can take it apart into “high” and “blood pressure”—that is, one can suffer from blood pressure that is high—but you cannot yoke together “high blood” and expect it to modify “pressure.” Someone might be tempted to hyphenate “adult cable television,” but what is an adult cable? You might refer to cable TV for adults as “adult cable,” but it’s not the same thing. A harrowing example is “baby back ribs.” They are not the ribs of a baby back but the back ribs of, yes, a baby. If you must order baby back ribs, try thinking of “baby” as meaning “miniature” instead of “wee creature.” Or become a vegetarian.
A phrase that teeters on the edge is “bad hair day.” Is a bad hair day like a Lu Burke day? That is what I say at the office when I am feeling especially irritable: that I am having a Lu Burke day. Lu had her virtues, but she could be bad-tempered. When she was angry or frustrated, for whatever reason, she would descend like a tornado on anyone who had the bad luck to be in her path. She reminded one of my colleagues of that cartoon Tasmanian Devil—a spinning, whirling ball of fury that would bite anyone or anything that got in its way. It helped to see this as comic: you could not take the behavior of a Tasmanian Devil personally, and Lu’s tirades were essentially harmless. According to Lu’s own logic, there would be a hyphen in “bad-hair day.” I like it better without the hyphen, though I don’t know that the compound “hair day” has any meaning. How was your hair day, dear? Have a fabulous hair day! The more you say it, the better it sounds. If Eleanor could hyphenate “blue-stained glass,” and Lu could throw a tantrum in the hall, I think I can hold the hyphen out of “bad hair day.”
Lu Burke once ridiculed a new copy editor who had come from another publication for taking the hyphen out of “pan-fry.” “But it’s in Web,” the novice chirped. “What are you even looking in the dictionary for?” Lu said, and I wish there were a way of styling that sentence so that you could see it getting louder and more incredulous toward the end. She spoke it in a crescendo, like Ralph Kramden, on The Honeymooners, saying, “Because I’ve got a BIG MOUTH!” Without the hyphen, “panfry” looks like “pantry.” “Panfree!” Lu guffawed, and said it again. “Panfree!” The copy editor was just following the rules, but Lu said she had no “word sense.” Lu was especially scornful of unnecessary hyphens in adverbs like “feet first” and “head on.” Of course, “head on” is hyphenated as an adjective in front of a noun—“The editors met in a head-on collision”—but in context there is no way of misreading “The editors clashed head on in the hall.” The novice argued that “head on” was ambiguous without the hyphen. Lu was incredulous. “Head on what?” she howled, over and over, as if it were an uproarious punch line. Eventually, that copy editor went back to where she had come from. “It’s as if I tried to become a nun and failed,” she confided. It did sometimes feel as if we belonged to some strange cloistered order, the Sisters of the Holy Humility of Hyphens.
The writer-editor Veronica Geng once physically restrained me from looking in the dictionary for the word “hairpiece,” because she was afraid that the dictionary would make it two words and that I would follow it blindly. As soon as she left the office, I did look it up, and it was two words, but I respected her word sense and left it alone. I once made “hairstyle” one word, having found it in Webster’s, and Lu appeared in my doorway instantaneously, like a fire engine screaming around the corner two seconds after you’ve pulled a false alarm. “We don’t close up ‘style’ compounds,” she said instructively. (She was having a good hair day.) I knew we made “life style” two words, but I thought it was because we disapproved of the concept of a “lifestyle,” and that was our way of showing it. I was learning that the dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can’t let it push you around, especially where compound words are concerned. Also that a hyphen is not a moral issue.