Compound Adjectives

Sometimes you have a word that together with another word modifies a noun immediately following it. You separate these words with a hyphen (actually you join them with that hyphen). So you can have an after-hours party, for example. You can do this with more than two words, too, such as an after-the-fact pronouncement. I don’t recommend that you get carried away, but it is possible to do, as Brooke McEldowney demonstrates by describing a remarkable quandary in his excellent comic, 9 Chickweed Lane:

Maybe this falls into the category of hyperbole.

Three things about these compound adjectives:

1. If you leave off the hyphen it means something different. In my first example above, without the hyphen you end up being after something called an hours party, whatever that is.
2. Really common compounds often end up becoming single words. We used to have pre-nuptial agreements, but now it’s a prenuptial agreement. Same for pickup truck. Even “today” used to be “to-day.”
3. Don’t hyphenate if it’s not an adjective. You can do something after the fact. And you can party after hours!

PS. I just started to re-read a book I had read as a teen-ager, The Egg and I by Betty McDonald. It was published in 1945, and made quite a mark at the time. They even made a movie out of it. The movie featured Ma and Pa Kettle, predecessors to the Beverly Hillbillies. But I digress. The first chapter of the book has this sentence; it serves as an example of the gentle humor typical of the book:

This I’ll-go-where-you-go-do-what-you-do-be-what-you-are-and-I’ll-be-happy philosophy worked out splendidly for Mother, for she followed my mining engineer father all over the United States and led a fascinating life; but not so well for me, because although I did what she told me and let Bob choose the work in which he felt he would be happiest and then plunged wholeheartedly in with him, I wound up on the Pacific Coast in the most untamed corner of the United States, with a ten-gallon keg of good whiskey, some very dirty Indians, and hundreds and hundreds of most uninteresting chickens.