“Nothing is to be gained by making a sacred cow out of compounding—nor yet by dismissing it as a hobby of the language cranks,” he writes. “It is puzzling, difficult—but not an unfathomable mystery, not impossible of practical treatment. Neither those who sidestep it nor those who turn it into a nightmare are doing right.” In capitals, he writes, “THE PRIME NECESSITY IS TO SAFEGUARD AGAINST MISREADING.” The hyphen is like the comma in this: follow some rules, sure, but in the end what you’re after is clarity of meaning.
One bad habit Teall wishes to cure us of right away is mistreating the hyphen by putting it between an adverb ending in ly and a participle. His example is a headline: “Use of ‘Methodist’ Is Newly-Defined.” Lavishing sympathy on the hyphen, he laments, “Did you ever see a hyphen more completely wasted? A hyphen more unnecessarily and fruitlessly employed?” Even in such a frequently used compound as “well known,” Teall would omit the hyphen in both the attributive and the predicate position. (The New Yorker follows him halfway, omitting the hyphen in the predicate position—“The man is well read”—but employing it in the attributive: “I like a well-read man.” However, if you further qualify it by saying “I like a very well read man,” the hyphen wants to pop back out again. The damn thing really does have a life of its own.) The easiest compounds to codify are adjectives formed from the past participle (irregular or formed with -ed) preceded by an adjective, a noun, or an adverb that does not end in ly. Teall’s list includes such classics as hardboiled (The New Yorker uses the hyphen for the egg and one-words it for a person), long-winded, soft-hearted, tight-fisted, and hyphen-minded. All these compounds take the hyphen. Of these, only “soft-hearted” has lost its hyphen. Teall also admits to this club the combinations with the adverb “well” (well read, well told), which he prefers as two words, but he is so delighted that one rule covers so many compounds that he suppresses his personal preference. Still, he draws the line—again—at using a hyphen in phrases such as “a badly-torn book.” These are “monstrosities” representing “an excess of academic affectation.”
Each compound needs to have its parts analyzed before you can place or withhold the hyphen or make it into one word or two. Participles (the -ing form of the verb) sometimes function more like nouns than like adjectives, even if they look like adjectives. A “laughing stock” is not a stock that laughs, and a “walking stick” is not a stick that walks (unless we’re talking about an insect). Teall says that these participles form a function of “identification.” Examples are numerous: “working clothes” (the clothes don’t work; they are donned for working), “ironing board” (the board doesn’t iron; it is used for ironing), “whirling dervish” (yes, it is a dervish that whirls, but not “casually,” as he says; rather, the whirling dervish “is a member of a cult whose practice whirling is ritual,” making it distinct “from other kinds of dervishes”; “whirling” identifies the dervish). In his own words, Teall is making the same distinction that we mean by “restrictive.”
Teall feels that the words that lose the hyphen and become solid tend to be figurative (cowcatcher), while the ones that retain the hyphen are literal (bronco-buster). The same logic seems to be behind The New Yorker’s decision about “hardboiled” and “hardboiled.” I absorbed a version of this on the copydesk. A dog-lover is one who loves dogs; the dogs are the object of his love. James Thurber was a dog-lover. A dog lover, without the hyphen, is still a dog—the Tramp, say, in Lady and the Tramp. (Grammar via Disney!) A bird-watcher is a watcher of birds; a bird watcher would be a bird that keeps an eye on things. You can actually hear the difference (and feel the bird’s eye on you).
This was brought home to me when a woman from California, one Alice Russell-Shapiro, wrote a letter to the editor—the copy editor—of The New Yorker complaining about (among other things) the term “star fucker.” She was not the least offended by seeing the term in print, only by its lack of what she called the “activating hyphen.” I wonder whether she was a distant relative of Edward Teall’s—certainly they are both gifted explicators of the hyphen. In “star fucker,” without the hyphen, each word has equal weight: a fucker who is a star. But in “star-fucker” the hyphen tips the weight to the first element, the object (star) of the activity embodied in the noun (fucking).