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Comma Queen

How to Use (or Not Use) a Hyphen

Plus: a brief digression into why The New Yorker hyphenates
"teen-ager."

By Mary Norris

April 25, 2022

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An illustration of a hyphen in blue and green type.
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

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Among the many books about punctuation, precious few are devoted to a
single mark. There's "On the Dot," by the Brothers Humez, which
celebrates the period, or full stop; "Semicolon," a thoughtful
treatise by Cecelia Watson; and "Fucking Apostrophes," a jewel of a
book by Simon Griffin. The hyphen, which may not technically qualify
as a punctuation mark, because it operates at the level of the word
rather than the sentence--it doesn't make you pause (though it may
give you pause)--has inspired not one great book but two: "Meet Mr.
Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)," a classic by Edward N. Teall,
published in 1937, and "Hyphen," by Pardis Mahdavi, which came out in
2021.

Mahdavi, an Iranian-American (hyphen hers), was a dean at Arizona
State University when she tackled this project, as part of a series
for Bloomsbury Academic called Object Lessons, "about the hidden
lives of ordinary things." The invention of the hyphen has been
credited to Dionysius Thrax, a Greek grammarian who worked at the
Library of Alexandria in the second century B.C. Mahdavi writes, "The
elegant, sublinear bow-shaped U-hyphen . . . was used to fuse words
and highlight words that belonged together." Much later, in
fifteenth-century Germany, Johannes Gutenberg used hyphens liberally
(in their modern form) to justify the columns of heavy Gothic type in
his Bible. Gutenberg was born to Friele Gensfleisch (Gooseflesh), a
merchant, in Mainz. J. P. Morgan might not have been so keen to get
his hands on an edition of the historic work had it been known as the
Gensfleisch Bible.

More Comma Queen

  * The trick for choosing "who" vs. "whom."

  * Sympathy for the semicolon.

  * Female trouble: the debate over "woman" as an adjective.

  * A few words about that ten-million-dollar serial comma.

  * Excuse me! Your participle is dangling.

  * Whichcraft--"that" vs. "which."

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[norris-mar]
Mary Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978 and was a query
proofreader at the magazine for twenty-four years. She is the author
of "Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen" and "Greek to
Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen."
More:GrammarPunctuationHistoryLinguisticsIdentityBooks

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