Issue #14: Holding it together

There’s been a lot of chatter about em dashes lately. Em dashes are the long horizontal marks often used in place of commas or parentheses for emphasis, interruption, or afterthought.  For example: “He finally arrived—late, as usual.”

ChatGPT and other large language models love to use em dashes, and so they’ve become a telltale sign of AI involvement. If you were already using them in your writing before 2022—I’m guilty of that!—you’re now in the awkward position of having people think that your work is AI-generated unless you willfully suppress your dashing instincts. I, for one, will never adjust my linguistic tendencies in response to our AI overlords—at least, not knowingly. McSweeney’s supports me on this.

The ties that bind

Em dashes (—) divide thoughts, as above, and en dashes (–) typically show endpoints in a range, as in pages 5–20 or Boston–Chicago flight. These marks get their names from the relative widths of the letters M and N during the era of metal type.

But this week I’d like to focus on a different horizontal line entirely, the hyphen (-). Because while dashes divide, hyphens join, and we need more of the latter behavior lately.

Hyphens are most commonly used to glue words together into noun phrases like mother-in-law and jack-in-the-box; or into adjective phrases like long-term or smoke-filled or well-known. They’re also used to spell things out (Y-M-C-A) and to join syllables into words across lines of type—though that’s less relevant in modern typesetting.

Sometimes it’s fun to contemplate the de-hyphenated version of a phrase.  For instance, if you remove the hyphen from “the man-eating shark” you get its opposite.  If you remove the hyphen from “hot-dog vendor” you get a sexy pet store owner.

(ChatGPT wouldn’t let me generate an image for the “sexy pet store owner” example.)

In formal publishing, editors guard the distinctions between punctuation marks carefully, and the rules for when to use hyphens can seem especially fussy.  For example, the Chicago Manual of Style suggests a hyphen for Winston-Salem, but an en dash for Epstein–Barr virus.

The Associated Press Stylebook has steadily pared back its usage of hyphens.  See the “Punctuation” section on this page for some riveting discussion. Their guidelines used to say that you should put a hyphen in pre-eminent, but as of last year, they advocate preeminent.  (By way of protest, I now hear the word in my head with three syllables—PREE-mah-nent—whenever I see it spelled that way.)

The general rule is to use hyphens when leaving them out would make a sentence ambiguous, incorrect, or difficult to pronounce. Words routinely “graduate” from hyphenated to unhyphenated once they become familiar, so in some sense AP just did a mass graduation ceremony with their revised style guidelines. Today was once spelled to-day, and only by the 20th century (1920s in the US, and 1950s in the UK) did the fused spelling become the convention.  On-line and e-mail are more recent examples.  Using either of these hyphenations could mark you as a Gen Xer or worse. (Come to think of it, “online” sounds boomerish in 2025 with any spelling.  Isn’t everything online now?)

Hyper-hyphenation

Speaking of being online, I ran across a BlueSky thread asking if there are any 4-word hyphenated adjectives. Answer: Yes, many.  But this had me wondering about the most hyphenated naturally-occurring word.

Terms with 2 hyphens (mother-in-law, over-the-counter) and 3 hyphens (jack-in-the-box, middle-of-the-road) are fairly common, but it starts to get weird after that.

Using OneLook’s wildcard features we can find words that have 4 or more hyphens pretty easily by searching for *-*-*-*-*, which means “find 4 hyphens surrounded by other stuff.”  

This search returns many longwinded chemical compounds—boring!—but also a few adjective phrases that you might call hyper-hyphenated, such as what-you-see-is-what-you-get and knock-down-and-drag-out.  

The sole non-chemical noun phrase with 5 or more parts is this tall and enticing plant called kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate.

A kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate.  (Source)

You can probably see how it got its name.   It’s practically begging for a kiss as it dares you to use it in a sentence with its hyphens removed!  

Here’s a challenge that you can’t answer with OneLook:  Can you find a song that contains a 6-hyphen term in its official lyrics?  There are at least two that I know of, one of which was referenced in a recent issue of this newsletter.   A OneLook mug or gift card goes to the first reader to answer correctly.

Word games from around the Web

This week’s find has nothing to do with dashes or hyphens! It’s syndicated on many newspaper websites, but I’m linking to this New Zealand version because it’s got the least annoying ads. It looks like it’s been around for years and I’m only now finding out about it.

Unolingo:  Pronounce it like “You know lingo”, because…you know, lingo.  It’s a crossword variant, but it’s clueless—literally.  The sole constraint, beyond the letters that are filled in for you, is that you have to use every letter of the alphabet exactly once.  

In the example above (today’s puzzle), the “E_TRE_E” at the bottom could be filled in as “EXTREME” or maybe “ENTREE” — which one it is depends on the other answers, since, again, you can’t reuse any letters. (Nor can you re-use them.)  Odds are good that the correct fill is “EXTREME”, since it’s not immediately clear where else the “X” would be played.

Unolingo has faint echoes of our recent game, Pandergram, which also requires you to use every letter in the alphabet, though in a different, arguably less-fun way. As with Pandergram, a good strategy is to figure out where to use the rare letters (J, Q, X) first.  

Okay, that’s it for to-day!   Until next time, may you stay well-hyphenated.

Doug @ OneLook