The received wisdom about compounds is that they start out as two words, acquire a transitional hyphen, and then lose the hyphen, becoming one word. “Today” used to be hyphenated. “Ringtone” was two words for about a nanosecond before solidifying, skipping the hyphen stage completely. “Deluxe,” which started out as two French words (de luxe), was hyphenated at The New Yorker until February 5, 2003, when an editor in a particularly foul mood threw a fit and ripped the hyphen out of it. While I have to admit that “de-luxe” was quaint, the old-fashioned form seemed more luxurious to me, upholstered like a divan. Removing the hyphen made it into something you’d find on the menu at the local diner: Cheeseburger Deluxe.
The awful truth about hyphens and copy editors is that if there is one you want to take it out and if there’s not one you’re tempted to put one in. If we had to cast each hyphen individually, like Gutenberg’s punch cutter, we would be more sparing in our use of them. At least we’d have time to think about it. I like the hyphen in “high-school principal” because there actually is such a word as “school principal,” and if the school principal is high she should be escorted off the premises and given a TV series. A “high-school student” is perhaps fussier than necessary (who refers to “a school student”?), but, as with the serial comma, it’s easier to make up your mind and be consistent than it is to mull over every instance. And what’s wrong with being fussy? That’s what we’re getting paid for. Then again, what’s wrong with mulling over every instance?
In a story by Karen Russell, a boy is making fun of a girl who went to church, and asks, “How was it? . . . Delicious God-bread?” I was persuaded by another proofreader—another unique person with her own ideas and the brief to impose them—to remove the hyphen in “God-bread” and make it two words. But it bothered me without the hyphen, and later, walking back to the office after brooding over a sandwich, I realized that the analogy was not with, say, “raisin bread”: “God bread” was not studded with gods. It was God. First chance I got, I restored the hyphen in “God-bread.” Transubstantiation in a hyphen.
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The best thing ever written about hyphens is Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place), by Edward N. Teall, published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1937. For one thing, it may be the only full-length work on hyphens extant in English. Although written for the profession, for makers of style guides, it is entertaining enough for a general reader. Considering the rate at which the language changes, it’s incredible that a study of hyphens from three generations ago remains relevant. Mr. Hyphen was onto something. Teall, who lived from 1880 to 1947, and who was a graduate of Princeton (class of 1902), was descended from people who cared passionately about language. “My father specialized in the field of the compound word,” he writes. “We of his household may be said to have lived on hyphens. We did this figuratively, in that we heard them much discussed; literally, in that they translated into food, shelter, clothing and recreation, since they furnished the head of the house with remunerative employment.” Teall was preternaturally gifted—he knew what would bother us in the future. He considers the “amazing present-day high school fad alright” (though he does not really like to think of “all right” as a compound; notice he does without a hyphen in “high school”) and was decades ahead of The Honeymooners in his learned footnote on “po-lop-o-ny,” a nonexistent word modeled on “polyphony” and created when you close up “polo pony.” He also makes frequent references to compounds that occupy a “twilight zone.” Compounding is not a science, he says. “It should be regarded as an art, because personal preferences and individual judgments will always be decisive.” He says, “Good compounding is a manifestation of character.”
The word “hyphen” is from the Greek (which I should have known, from the hy and the ph in its spelling) and was originally an adverb meaning “together.” In form it was a curved horizontal line, set below the baseline: an open parenthesis lying on its back. It functions like the tie in music notation. Teall has a familiarity with the subject that comes from a lifetime of study and experimentation. He uses “hyphen” as noun and verb (rather than “hyphenate”), and speaks of ancient compounds that have “coalesced” into one word (“husband” is from the Anglo-Saxon hus and bonda, meaning “head of the house”) and of “one-wording” a compound.