Hyphens

“… separate business at arm’s-length from …”

Hyphens, Nouns, Possessives

I saw this yesterday in a company’s announcement about buying another company.

Problem:
The hyphen does not belong in this phrase.

Explanation:
One company was announcing the pending purchase of another company.

The purchase required approvals by various U.S. federal agencies.

The buyer wanted investors and employees to know that it was legally bound to continue to operate distinctly from the other company until all of those approvals had been secured.

The complete sentence announcing this legal constraint was along the lines of “We will continue to operate as a separate business at arm’s-length from [the company that we are buying].”

The problem with this sentence is that the hyphen does not belong.

The possessive “arm’s” is modifying the noun “length”, but together they are not modifying anything else, so no hyphen should appear between “arm’s” and “length”.

In contrast, a hyphen does belong in a phrase such as “arm’s-length transaction”.

Solution:
“… separate business at arm’s length from …”

“Change of venue location”

Adjectives, Hyphens, Nouns, Redundancies

I saw this yesterday in a TV commercial.

Problem:
This phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
“Change of venue location” appeared in Houston, Texas, in a television advertisement from Disney on Ice, an ice-skating theatrical performance company.

Disney put the phrase in the TV ad apparently because of Hurricane Ike’s impact on Houston.

If the phrase were approximately correct, then a hyphen should have been placed between “Change” and “of”, and another hyphen should have been placed between “of” and “venue”, so as to create a compound modifier of the noun “location”.

However, the noun “venue” and the noun “location” in modern parlance have come to mean the same thing, so this phrase contains a redundancy.

Beyond the redundancy, it is preferable to reserve the use of the noun “venue” to refer to the scene of a crime or to where a jury is convened.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Change of location”

“TOGO”

Adjectives, Devolution toward Simpler, Hyphens, Nouns

I saw this on a restaurant receipt.

Problem:
A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
I ordered some “take-out” food from a restaurant a couple of evenings ago.

While I was waiting for my order to be prepared, I studied the receipt.

Printed in all capital letters in the middle of it was “TOGO” — spelled T-O-G-O.

Beyond the ridiculousness of using all capital letters given the mixed-case font used throughout the receipt, the designer of the receipt surely did not mean to refer to the African country officially known as the Togolese Republic.

No, the designer was trying to indicate that the order was a take-out order — that the order was “to-go” — spelled T-O-HYPHEN-G-O.

The format of the receipt was more than four characters wide, so the omission of the hyphen between “TO” and “GO” could not be blamed on lack of space.

I believe that the omission of the hyphen is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the hyphen than to include it.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “to-go orders” — using T-O-HYPHEN-G-O — 332,000 matches
  • “togo orders” — using T-O-G-O — 3,390 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 97.9-to-1, which is very good.

I still have to wonder whether the restaurant receipt designer has even heard of the country of Togo. Perhaps if he or she had, then the need for the hyphen would have been more obvious.

Solution:
“TO-GO”