Hyphens

Hyphenation book in the works

Hyphens

Proper hyphenation seems to have become a somewhat-lost art form in American English.

I have blogged several times about hyphens.

Because this has been such a recurring topic in my blog, I decided last month to write a book about it.

The book is tentatively titled “XX Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens”.

I have not finalized “XX” because I am still identifying all of the common mistakes.

But I can tell you already that “XX” will be greater than fifteen.

I am working on organizing the book around clusters or categories of mistakes.

Every documented type of mistake will include multiple examples of the mistake, solutions for those examples, and explanations about why something is a mistake and how to avoid it.

I am announcing the book today so that you can keep an eye out for the official announcement that the book has been published.

In the mean time, if you have a question about hyphenation, then please contact me. I will review your question and make sure that I answer it — generally, if not specifically — in the book.

Thanks!

By the way: I promise to NEVER trade, rent or sell your email address to any third party online or offline. Period!

UPDATE: My How to Use Hyphens book is now available in softcover and several eBook editions. Learn more here!

“Relay” vs. “Re-lay”

Hyphens, Verbs, Versus

I thought about these two words after my wife this morning talked about removing and replacing some floor tiles.

Problem:
Although the two verbs sound alike, only one of them refers to the process of removing and replacing something.

Explanation:
The verb “relay” — spelled R-E-L-A-Y — means to carry or pass along by or as if by relays.

The verb “re-lay” — spelled R-E-HYPHEN-L-A-Y — means to lay again.

In other words, one can not “relay” — without the hyphen — floor tiles.

Instead, one must “re-lay” — with the hyphen — floor tiles.

However, because the two verbs sound alike, one must have the context of an expression or sentence to determine whether the heard verb is “relay” — without the hyphen — or “re-lay” — with the hyphen.

Solution:
Use the verb “relay” — without the hyphen — when referring to the noun “relay”. Use the verb “re-lay” — with the hyphen — when referring to laying something again.

“BEEF STEW TO-DAY!”

Hyphens

I saw this the other night in an episode of “The Twilight Zone”.

“BEEF STEW TO-DAY” — with a hyphen between “TO” and “DAY” — was on a sign in the background of a scene that was filmed in a cafe.

The hyphenated form of “today” caught my eye.

The SciFi television channel was running a marathon of Twilight Zone episodes, and the logo in the lower-right corner of the TV screen indicated that Twilight Zone started in 1958.

That would date the hyphenated form of “today” to around the late ’50s to early ’60s.

I mentioned the hyphenated form to my wife, and she had the same reaction as I did: “Oh, yeah. That’s right! The word ‘today’ used to be hyphenated, at least on signs.”

I tried to find instances of the hyphenated form “TO-DAY” on Google, but for the life of me I still have not determined how to force Google to include the hyphen in my searches. If you know how to do this, then please let me know!*

I then searched Google for the phrase “hyphenated today” and got a link to one interesting page.

Someone had posted this question at AnswerBag.com: When and why did hyphenated words such as “to-day”, “good-bye”, “to-morrow” and such lose their hyphens?

Here are two salient responses posted at AnswerBag:

  • The previous use of hyphens was lilely [sic] an aid to syllabication. Currently, the over-use of hyphens is a crutch for unsure spellers.
  • For literal reasons, such as pronounciation [sic].

Bottom line: The word “today” is no longer hyphenated, but I am unsure about the full history of the hyphenated form. The most that I can say is that about fifty years ago it was still being hyphenated on occasion on signs in the USA.

*20090210 Update:
William E. Thompson emailed this tip to me (Thanks, William!):
To search for To-Day on google, I used

“to day” hyphenated

as my search criteria (in fact, that is how I found this page). In many cases, the space character can be used to represent punctuation.

*20110327 Update:
ThatDeborahGirl emailed this note to me (Thanks, Deb!):
It reminded me of “Rilla of Ingleside”, a book in the “Anne of Green Gables” series that I was reading online. I came across a line that hyphenated the word “today”. I wasn’t sure if it was a typo; or that maybe in the original text the word had been hyphenated as a way of diving the word on two lines or, my very first thought, was that maybe the word “today” had once been hyphenated.

As a result of that post, I decided to do some research and figure out, for once and for all, if “today” had once been a hyphenated word.

I came across your post “Beef Stew To-Day” and it confirmed that fact, but you stated that you hadn’t found any other reference for it online. So I thought I’d tell you that the text for this book is online at Project Gutenberg. Anne is agonizing over the WWI and how the women can only wait and worry about their men fighting overseas and her thought is “How the girls of to-day have to suffer” in comparison to her happy childhood at Green Gables.

So, just a bit of trivia, but a bit I thought you’d like to know if you hadn’t found it already.