Hyphens: A Guide for the 21st Century
By
Lenny Everson
rev
1
Copyright Lenny Everson 2011
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Foreword
This book is an ongoing work. I hope you’ll send corrections you think should be in here, as long as you don’t charge me for them. I could probably have added a few more rules or uses of hyphens but at the moment I’m drinking scotch without a glass and never want to see a hyphen again. But I should be over that, eventually.
It appears there are creatures called “n-dashes” and “m-dashes.” An n-dash is as wide as the letter “n” and an m-dash is wider.
Many will be shocked and appalled to find out that some of what I call “hyphens” are, by some rules, n-dashes. This is especially true in ranges of numbers such as “1957-1988” and in the joining of names such as “Jim-Bob knew nothing of the Sino-Albanian friendship treaty.”
The rule I follow in this book is that if there’s a space before and after it, it’s a dash of some sort. If not, I’ve included it in this book and called it a hyphen. I figured this would save you the trouble of deciding what’s an n-dash and what’s a hyphen.
If that bothers you, just think of this as a book for the usage of “hyphens and n-dashes.”
The Basic Idea
A hyphen indicates that two words (or parts of words) belong together.
That’s it. The rest is made up of a few silly-ass rules that nobody has bothered to change.
Please Note
Hyphens are seldom really important. Everybody screws up the rules all the time and few airplanes are falling out of the sky because of it.
I know that the author of a book like this is supposed to tell you that this topic is totally vital to your life and life will never be the same if you don’t learn it by heart.
But the truth is, it’ll seldom make a difference if you screw up on hyphens. People will correct you if you use them wrong, but people will correct you if you use them right. They say don’t sweat the small stuff, and hyphens are pretty small. Mostly, they’re a convenience you use when you want to make sure people link two things together, nothing more.
Not that you (and I) won’t meet lots of people who think correct use of grammar holds up the world…. Some of these people will remain calm in differences of religion and politics, but get out the shotgun over spelling and grammar.
Some Principles of Hyphens
The Paycheck Principle
There are times when the people you work for want to do it one way, and you know it’s supposed to be another way. If it’s the marketing people and they have the ear of the CEO and the CEO has the short hairs of your boss and you still have that mortgage to pay off, phone your bank manager and ask which is more important, a hyphen or your continued employment.
Don’t sweat the small stuff and a hyphen’s really small! It’s not worth fighting for!
What’s “Right” in Grammar
The rules of grammar tell you how to use hyphens (and you can get them from other books) but the rules never stop changing.
Samuel Johnson, who made the first worthwhile English dictionary, said that clothing styles change; why shouldn’t language? He’s right.
There are a lot of times you’ll get into an argument over usage with one side arguing that a particular use is justified by history or logic, and the other arguing that common usage has changed the meaning and made a new use legitimate.
So what’s currently “right in grammar” is mostly determined by three factors: history, logic, and common usage.
For example we still use the words “knight” and “lamb” but we don’t pronounce the “k” or the “b” in them. That’s a historical legacy that’s unlikely to change.
“Bill and I tossed Arnie a skunk. Arnie tossed it back to Bill and me.” Grammatical logic says we have to use “I” in the first sentence and “me” in the second (you can delete the “Bill and” in the second sentence to check it out.)
Almost nobody uses the British meaning of billion (a million million) anymore; the world now uses the American meaning (a thousand million). This is just the triumph of enough people using the word.
An Easy One
Let’s start with an easy rule, a real rule, and one you can follow blindly.
Hyphenate the numbers between twenty-one and ninety-nine.
(At least the two-part numbers.)
But if you don’t, this will hardly ever make a difference. I mean, if you leave a note for Betty saying, “BRING TWENTY SIX PACKS OF BEER” she might not know whether to bring twenty six-packs of beer or twenty-six packs (whatever constitutes a pack in her mind) of beer.
I asked some people to add a hyphen to the message. Most put it between “SIX” and “PACKS”. But one person said “Put it wherever you like as long as it is *not* between six and packs. Better to have 26 packages of beer and hope that a pack equals a case of 24 than limit yourself to 20 6-packs.”
Either way, it’s not enough for a good party and you’ll have to go back for more.
Twenty-one vestal virgins and six hundred and sixty-six little devils loaded ninety-nine bottles of beer onto the back of my truck…. You get the idea.
A pack of beer for the party
Almost as Easy
You’ll see a lot of hyphens at the ends of lines in “justified” text. That’s because making both the right and left edges line up nicely (like they do in newspapers) means that a lot of words get broken up. So parts of words get put onto the following line.
Text generated by computers seldom does this even with really long words like the very famous Mary Poppins supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or antidisestablishmentarianism.
The rules for breaking words that go over onto the next line are:
Put the hyphen at the end of the line, never at the beginning of the next line.
Never divide a monosyllable, or four-letter words.
Divide between syllables, and generally split two-consonant combinations such as the two l’s in “generally.”
Never leave just one letter on either line.
Never leave an “-ed” by itself on one line.
One-Letter Words
One-letter words are always attached with a hyphen: H-bomb, t-shirt, x-axis or X-axis, s-tine, the v-word.
He yelled the v-word at some guy in a t-shirt and ended up needing lots of x-rays.
You wear a G-suit in a fighter plane and a g-string while dancing on the bar.
But note that if you’re tuning a guitar, tune the G string.
Some Prefixes and Suffixes
There is a whole slew of prefixes and suffixes that commonly use a hyphen to join themselves to a word, even if some (such as “self”), can exist on their own.
Mind you, some of these are becoming used without the hyphen and will become legit. “Self-help” is as often used without the hyphen as two words (“self help”) and occasionally as one word (“selfhelp”).
Here are some common prefixes and suffixes used with hyphens:
Ex. My ex-wife and ex-girlfriend came to some surprising agreements on my basic character, ancestry, and future prospects in an afterlife.
Half. My half-ass brother-in-law phoned for money again. He wants to try out for halfback with the Argonauts.
Self. A self-help book might help you cure years of self-abuse and increase your self-esteem.
Others include
Pre- (pre-confederation)
Anti- (anti-slavery)
Re- (re-televise). “Re” tends to join the word it follows, eventually, but sometimes you have to keep it separate. For example, a football club can “re-sign” a player, but not often “resign” one.
Trans- (a trans-Earth return flight)
Non- (On a wall in the Park Villa Motel in Midland, Ontario: THIS IS A NON-SMOKING ROOM.)
Now- (now-defunct)
-old (centuries-old)
-like (apartheid-like conditions)
…although there’s a tendency to skip the hyphen wherever possible and just join the parts.
Sometimes hyphens are used when two vowels would be forced together, as in pre-eminent, re-evaluation, or anti-inflammatory. Or when a prefix joins a capitalized word (“pre-Islamic.)
Yet, “re-entry” is commonly changed into “reentry,” and “co-operative” is commonly “cooperative.” And, since few objected, pre-Cambrian is usually Precambrian. It happens.
If this causes some visual confusion, the joining process takes longer.
Fractions and Ratios
The rule is:
Use hyphens in fractions that are used as descriptions:
He’s three-quarters nuts.
I’m one-fifth sentient before my morning coffee.
Don’t use hyphens in fractions used as nouns:
Three quarters of writers are chocolate fiends.
Cats sleep seven eighths of their lives.
Since you can’t remember this any more than I can, just don’t use a hyphen if the fraction is followed by “of.”
Frequent usage is eroding the hyphen in many fractions. We have Halfbacks, quartertones, halftones, and quarterpounders.
If your kid’s training program player-instructor ratio is five-to-one, use the hyphens.
The Vanishing Hyphen
Any good grammar book will tell you how hyphens offer an intermediate step between a two-word phrase and a resulting single noun.
Some words in Huckleberry Finn include cat-fish, drift-wood, and table-cloth, all of which have since lost their hyphens. On the other hand, “drift-log” has just disappeared, probably due to the lack of valuable logs just drifting loose on rivers.
A common example in grammar books is the word “boyfriend” (or “girlfriend”, of course). Half a century ago “boy friend” was becoming “boy-friend” and eventually it became commonly used as “boyfriend”.
I found one grammar text, dating from the fifties, that was betting against it happening to “girl-friend.” But the text was confident that “high school” would become “highschool.” They were, of course, wrong.
One thing they didn’t consider is that the words “high school” exist on letterheads, jackets, and on metal letters fastened securely to the fronts of large buildings. That sort of thing will be slow to change, you know.
It’s easy to see how “anti-lock” (as in “brakes”) could follow the same route as “anti-“ in “antiseptic” – eventually joining the word.
Nowadays the language is generally skipping the hyphenated midstage, and going directly to a one-word noun from the source two words.
As an example, when I was drawing up a list of things to take on a canoeing trip, I included “sunblock” and a “drybag”. My spell-check program in Word flagged both of them as errors. A search on the Web showed these about equally common in both single- and two-word formats. The dictionaries will catch up, I expect, sometime after I’ve got rained on in my canoe and need a drybag more than the sunblock. After all, “sunscreen” is quite acceptable to Word. And a drybag is what boaters use to keep things dry, while a dry bag is just a bag that hasn’t got wet yet.
My Word dictionary, incidentally, accepts “spell-check” and “spell check” but not “spellcheck,” But it’s happy with “spellchecker.”
Sometimes this word-joining process gets people into trouble. The University of Waterloo, for example, has a sign directing people to the “USED BOOKSTORE.” (One would hope the store was used; otherwise it was a mistake building it….)
Obviously, and not illogically, at some point at this institute of higher learning “book store” became “bookstore”. Alas for logic, it then became impossible at that point to use the more informative “USED-BOOK STORE”. That’s the way life goes. People still get there and know what they’re going to find inside.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada puts out The Baitfish Primer. “Baitfish” is one word in this booklet, as is “sportfish.” The term, “game fishes,” however, remains two words.
Looking for the excitement of words in evolution? The world of computers has a language changing steadily. Watch as words like “e-mail“ become “email” even before the staples get put into this booklet.
There are hold-outs to the extinction of hyphens. Rogers Communications lists “Rogers” as a “trade-mark,” (with a hyphen), regardless of what the United States Patent and Trademark Office says. Mind you, in Canada there’s its equivalent, the Canadian Intellectual Properties office, which manages the Canadian Trade-Marks Database and other facilities with a hyphen in the middle.
The Dutch seem to have a traditional aversion to hyphens, by the way, casually joining many words into one. For example, Autobandventieldopjesfabrieksonderdirecteurssecetarressewerkzaamhedenparkeerplaatsschoonmakersovereenkomsten, has something to do with how the secretary to the assistant manager in a factory that makes material for valve caps deals with work contracts for the people that clean the parking area. (It’s one word – my Word program didn’t even try to hyphenate it.)
Separating Numbers with Hyphens
My local phone company last month decided that everybody in the province is moving to nine-digit numbers. So if you want to phone someone to get told off, you’ll have to call 555-381-8765. You don’t press any hyphen button on the phone; the hyphens are there just to help visually separate the numbers.
The old method of using parentheses for the area code (555) 381-8765 worked well, but hyphens are a more common method for separating large numbers, so we might as well use them.
Oh, yes. I told you that hyphens are used to join things. Well I lied. They can occasionally be used to separate things.
There are a lot of places where hyphens are used to separate numbers into reasonably small sections. Note the International Standard Book Number, ISBN 0-88022-501-7. The hyphens are solely for us humans. When computers rule, the world won’t need them.
Dates
Hyphens are also used in dates. When I check my receipts for September 5, 2006, I might find some dated 06/09/05, others dated 2006/09/05, 05 SEP 2006, 09/05/06, 09-05-06, 9/5/06, 2006-Sep-05, 09/05/2006, 9/5/2006, or Sep 05 2006.
There’s not a lot of consistency. Supposedly Americans use month-day-year while the rest of the planet prefers day-month-year.
The correct format, set by international standard ISO 8601 (and Canadian standard CAN/CSA-Z234.4-89), would be 2006-09-05. Think of your old high school looking up the date you were expelled for getting over-friendly with Marie-Anne out behind the baseball diamond. They’d pull the records for the year, then narrow it to the month, then look for the records of the specific day. It’s a process of narrowing. I’ve switched to it.
The international standard allows you to use spaces instead of the hyphens, or even run the digits together for data transmission. And you can express a range of days as 2006-09-05/12. If you add the time of day, such as sixteen minutes and 27 seconds past 10 in the morning, use colons, as in: 2006-09-05-10:16:27
For several years I led a campaign to get people who put the date onto my MasterCard receipts to switch to the international standard, with a total lack of success.
Compound Descriptions
Before and After
A construction that needs hyphens before a noun normally doesn’t need them after.
I have hard-to-buy-for friends. My friends are hard to buy for.
The room was full of single-malt-scotch enthusiasts. They were, of course, drinking single-malt scotch. A right-hand-lane accident is in the right-hand lane. He was a well-heeled bastard. The bastard was well heeled.
Somehow this is a rule that bothers me. I keep wanting to put the hyphen in after the noun. But what can you do?
The hyphens are kept, of course, for any construction that is clearer if you keep the hyphen. A gluten-free loaf of bread will stay gluten-free. Know-how will stay know-how.
A Cautionary Story
My friend Al and I had a minor discussion. In an email about my passport, I said I wanted to keep it up-to-date, and asked him to notice the correct use of hyphens.
But he didn’t like my use of hyphens, saying, “I disagree. I have an up-to-date passport, and I keep it up to date.”
I said my Webster's gives "up-to-date" as a hyphenated unit, regardless of position in the sentence, rather than three words that are hyphenated only when used as a modifier.
“Which Webster's?” he asked, suspiciously.
“Webster's II New Riverside Dictionary that I bought from Casablanca for 25 cents,” I admitted.
“Never heard of the bum,” he emailed back quickly. “Webster's’ is not copyright; many publishers use it. The current definitive U.S.-English unabridged dictionary is Merriam-Webster Third International.”
So I drove to the the Pioneer Park library and checked with the 3rd International Merriam-Webster, which told me, in example of word usage, "the new 10th edition is up-to-date".
He replied to this revelation with, “Oh. Ugh.”
Somewhat later in the creation of this book I came across a page I’d torn from some grammar book. It described the before-and-after construction then used “up to date” as an example “…findings that are up to date.”
I told this to Al and he commended the grammar book. I reminded him that he’d said the Merriam-Webster was the ultimate authority.
“Not always,” he replied.
Rule: If your chosen dictionary lists a compound (such as “up-to-date” or cul-de-sac”) with hyphens, then keep it that way wherever you use it. If not, the compound usually loses the hyphens after the noun.
Examples from my twenty-five-cent dictionary includes able-bodied, absent-minded, accident-prone and across-the-board, which is about as far as I got into the dictionary.
And if you still disagree, then call Al: he’ll issue you a blanket amnesty.
Titles and Positions
There are a bunch of words that come with a tradition as old as telling your kids that you’ll catch them if they ever lie to you.
“I was horrified to find that my sister-in-law had been elected secretary-treasurer of the local savings-and-loan association. Then again, she calls me her dickhead-in-law. That’s okay, she lives in a world of make-believe anyway.”
Many multi-word military ranks and positions are traditionally (and logically) hyphenated. Sergeant-at-Arms, for example.
“Secretary-General” may be a position you’ve aspired to, but you can be engineer-industrialist, instead, if you have the skills.
“Commander-in-chief” is an interesting construction. Most grammar books will tell you it’s got those two hyphens in it.
The TV show with Geena Davis didn’t use hyphens, but that’s Hollywood, or whatever, for you.
But, interestingly enough, the writers of the Constitution of the United States, who made the president the commander in chief, didn’t use hyphens either. But then, what did they know?
I’ve seen it abbreviated as c.-in-c. (in a history book).
The term, “mother-in-law”, is another one in the process of losing its hyphens. It’s found as often without them as with them. Sister-in-law is virtually always spelled with hyphens.
But if you’re going to drop a hyphen, make sure it doesn’t offer confusion. The wine-and-cheese festival I was at last weekend offered “horse & buggy rides” but I don’t think they’d have let me try to ride the horse.
The point of hyphens, is, of course, to make sure a pair or group of words is perceived together. But if a group is tied together often enough, then the reader groups it as a single concept anyway. The hyphens get left out, and nobody notices except those people who, like me, can’t remember where the hyphen key is.
Descriptive Compounds
When several words describe something it’s often necessary to use hyphens to clarify what’s meant. For example, you may need to distinguish between a high-school kid and a high school kid.
Hyphens clarify which words go together. If you want to find a man-eating fish, you can go to the aquarium. If you want to find a man eating fish, you can go to a restaurant.
There is, of course, a difference between one’s personal liberation dreams and one’s personal-liberation dreams. The former could apply to René Lévesque of Québec, and the latter to any fellow who doesn’t like his job and dreams of leaving.
One of my favorite examples of using hyphens in descriptive compounds can be found in an article in The Walrus. Here Marni Jackson imagines the truly upscale adult protective undergarment as a “high-absorbing, low-riding, Burberry-plaid saucy thong.”
A man-eating fish attacking a man eating fish
Things Associated, Willingly or Not
A hyphen joins words that are associated. Some associations are friendly; other are not:
A hyphen can substitute for “and” or “versus.” Either way, the people or items involved are married by a hyphen:
the Martin-Chrétien wars
Israeli-Palestinian harmony
Hall-Dennis report
Old World-New World divide
Lawyer-client confidentiality
Improvised Compounds
You can make up your own compounds, if you want.
Asshole-in-command. Cat-of-a-thousand-hairballs. A we’re-out-of-peanut-butter sandwich.
You can make up any construction you want, but you’ll have to decide whether or not to use the hyphens. They make the construction look more formal, but don’t add much to comprehension, so you might want to just omit them.
The Really Exceptional Adverb
Don’t use a hyphen in two-word constructions where the first word ends in –“ly.”
“He was a well-dressed man and she was a barely dressed woman. They got along well.”
This is another perfectly strange rule that always bothered me, but dedicating my completely misspent life to its overthrow would be an unnaturally stupid act, even for me.
The same no-hyphen rule applies to other adverbs, too, such as “very.”
Titles, Headings and Signs
A sign in front of a service centre on the 401 (a six-lane freeway) between London and Kitchener: FULL AND SELF SERVE.
In a brochure: COOKING CLASS HOURS.
There’s a hyphen or two missing from those, but in movie titles, book titles, highway signs and darn near anything that isn’t a normal sentence in the middle of a normal page of text, hyphens (and other rules of grammar) are often ignored.
Feel free to do so yourself; I won’t complain.
Fake Aboriginal Names
It used to be popular to use “made-up” American Aboriginal (then called “Indian”) names. You can still sent your son to YMCA Camp Mi-Te-Na or your daughter to camp Tik-A-Witha and I’ve paddled with a person our paddling group calls Sits-With-a-Book.
But these are quickly disappearing, or at least the hyphens in them are. I suppose that’s just as well.
Place Names from Other Languages
Some primarily English-speaking countries include places with names taken from non-English sources, such as ethnic groups or preexisting nations. How they deal with these depends on the individual governing body.
The Australian Northern territory Department of Planning and Infrastructure says, “The use of hyphens to connect parts of names should in most cases be avoided and the name written as one word or as separate words established by usage.”
This author is neither stupid nor insane enough to tackle hyphens in Welsh, and, thank God, Welsh isn’t English and so is outside the scope of this little book.
In 1933 the U.S. Post Office recommended, “Do not use hyphens in connecting parts of names” when it came to naming post offices.
The Wisconsin Geographic Names Council seems to feel the same way, recommending no hyphens in any new names.
In Canada, place names in Québec with 2 or more words of French origin are often hyphenated, for example, Ste-Marthe-du-Cap-de-la-Madeleine, or St-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! But I digress….
Naturally Hyphenated Words
Some words, such as yo-yo, are hyphenated for no apparent reason. Many of these are fresh from foreign languages.
Keep them as the dictionary has them, even if yomania.com’s tricks page variously spells it both “yo-yo” and “yoyo,” seemingly at random.
People’s Names, If They So Choose
We may contemplate Mr. John-Boy Walton and Mrs. Simone Smyth-Jones. If people want to hyphenate their names, they’re free to do it any way they want.
Note: These, in some books, are examples of n-dashes, not hyphens.
Quantities and Measurements
Many measurements use hyphens. Examples include the following from a secondhand Guinness book of world records I bought for ninety-five cents at Casablanca, a used-book store.
3,000-m. short-track speed-skating relay event [won by a 13-year-old girl]
11-month-old baby boy [got married]
7-ft.6-in. sculpture [of Buddha, made of cotton]
80-ft.-high candle
50-kg column of bricks [lifted by a guy by one ear]
the 3,461.63-mile-long New York-London journey (1 hr. 54 min. by Lockheed SR-71A)
$15-million paperback
15-yd.-long hopscotch
A Range of Values
A hyphen may indicate a range of values, such as Nov. 6-7, 1998 or $7,500-$15,000.
It may be used for a range of ages, such as the demographic, eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds.
Note: These, in some books, are examples of n-dashes, not hyphens.
Product Names and Specialized Jargon
Product names are set by marketing departments. They can do anything they want with them. Jargon is in-group talk, and if they want to call a xxx a sss then they can do so.
Pan-Am, 1-2-3, 737-300
Just leave them as they are.
Dual-Purpose Items
If an item can be used for two purposes, you can hyphenate it. A canner-cooker, for example both cans and cooks.
Many texts (and marketing departments) use a slash to mean the same thing. You should prefer a hyphen, which carries more the meaning of “and” rather than “or” as the slash does.
Spelling Out Numbers
If you’re a fan of Tammy Wynette, you’ll remember her hit, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”, in which she tells how they have to spell out the words they don’t want their little son to understand. Words like T-O-Y or maybe S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E. And, of course (it is a country song after all) D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
To write out words that are spoken one letter at a time, use hyphens.
The same applies to sequences of numbers which are spoken individually: “it’s as easy as 1-2-3!”
Pronunciation
The Shores of Erie Wine Festival program guide gives pronunciation help using hyphens. Sauvignon Blanc (So-vee-gnah-blanh). (Note that the title of the festival has no hyphens, being guided by the rules in “Titles, Headings, and Signs.”
And a Dash?
It separates things — think of it as a substitute for parentheses — that you want separated.
It separates things (think of it as a substitute for parentheses) that you want separated.
When to Forget the Hyphens
Quite often, you really don’t really need hyphens, even if the “rules” ask you to use them.
“This is a non smoking room” is a sign on the wall of a Park Villa motel room in Midland. Darn well needs a hyphen. Darn well doesn’t – we know what they mean.
If Marlboro Lites are “the choice of 14 year old girls” we can figure it out from context whether the product is used by “14-year-old girls” or “14 year-old girls.”
Three year-old girls enjoying a puff
This “permission to forget the hyphens” is most commonly exercised with words that are commonly and routinely associated with each other. For example GM advertises a “Canada Wide Sale.” We can figure that out. They’re not just pushing wide vehicles.
Telus advertises it has the “fastest wireless high speed network.” Even without the hyphen between “high” and “speed” it’s likely nobody noticed.
Bose tells us about one system’s “credit card style” remote.” Logic would require a hyphen between “credit” and “card” in this case, but nobody has complained to Bose yet, I imagine.
And do you think that the “Robbie Burns Day Celebration” really needs hyphens? The Walrus journal didn’t.In another example a phrase such as mother-in-law can be so seen by people as one word that the hyphens are perceived as not necessary. Uncle-in-law would always be hyphenated.
How can you tell that a phrase is so commonly used that you can get away without hyphens? One method is to Google the phrase on the Net. The Net is full of stupid people wandering around in their erroneous zones, but at least it’s an indication of the common trends if you’re that brave. If you get 817,251 hits on what’s grammatically wrong, you know there are at least 817,251 people out there who won’t criticize you.
Sometimes you really do need the hyphens. “Donna synthesized 3 phenylpropanal molecules” is not the same as “Donna synthesized 3-phenylpropanal molecules,” as David Spira, Chemical Engineer, points out.
In the first sentence the 3 refers to the number of molecules, in the second sentence the 3 refers to the carbon atom that the phenyl-ring is attached to.
The Ontario Hunting Regulations Summary for 2006
This 96-page guide stands as a monument to an organization and a whole forest-full of hunters with guns who don’t really care much about hyphens. Ducks, yes. Deer, yes. Even grackles. But not hyphens, most of the time.
Here’s a few of the places I’d use a hyphen but the Ministry of Natural Resources didn’t:
Outdoors card centre, wild turkey licensing line, controlled deer hunt draw application system, additional deer game seals telephone system, moose draw results, Ontario Hats for Hides Corporation, banded birds reporting, small game licences available, moose validation tag draw deadline, and antlerless deer automated telephone licensing and draw application.
Once they get past these specialized constructions, they’re much better, but you still get the feeling they’ve been using hyphens as skeet.
The Mill-Race-Festival Booklet
I got this book when I paid three dollars to support the event, which itself is a three-day music festival held in Cambridge, Ontario, in August.
A mill race is a channel for waters going to and from a mill. The remnants of the mill and the mill race form a nice background to the event. But about the book….
The planners, to go by the book, call it the “Mill-Race Festival of Traditional Folk Music.”
Inside the book, the mayor and council extend best wishes to “the Mill Race Festival,” obviously having eliminated the hyphen in a budget cut.
The Kiwi restaurant is a sponsor of the “Mill-Race Folk Festival,” while the Black Badger pub supports the “Mill Race Annual Folk Festival and L.A. Franks is in “Mill Race Park.” Meanwhile the Galt Club asks us to check the “Millrace Program” for all event times.
But that’s okay. The music was good.
Horse Racing
It seems (from the racing scores) that the names of racehorses aren’t usually hyphenated. There’s a lot of tradition involved, I’d imagine, so Just Why Worry, All Time Favorite, Lexus Catchadream, Triplediamondjiffy and Lady Gi Gi get to run without the burden of hyphens.
Standardbred results are listed in the format of the following examples: EXACTOR(1-8), SUPERFECTA (1-8-5-3) and TRIACTOR (1-8-5). The hyphens in this case mean “then,” indicating the order in which the horses came in. We should have bet on horse #1 in this race.
Baseball and Football Statistics
Baseball
In the sports section “Today’s Games” lists the teams and the win-loss scores of the starting pitchers for each team. Texas (Padilla 13-9) at Oakland (Blanton 14-10), 3:35 p.m. This season Padilla won thirteen games and lost nine.
Canadian Football
The paper lists the teams scores (win-loss-tie). Hamilton: Away 1-5-0.
The Tiger-Cats need a new coach.
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My thanks to the support of Gordon Varney, Patron of the Arts.