One Wrong, One Correct

Look at the two hyphens:

• The first hyphen is wrong. “Well” is a plain old adverb modifying “known.”
• The second hyphen is correct. “Well-known” is a compound adjective modifying “places.

I admit, the difference is a bit subtle.

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Usually when I write about compound adjectives, I use one (or more) as an example. Here’s a good example of a pair of adjectives that do not make a compound! Headlines are often incorrect, but this time they got it reasonably right. I ran into this headline recently (mid-July 2020) in the local paper:

No mask mandate in Pocatello, at least for now

As written, this means “no mandate regarding masks…” because the adjectives don’t modify each other; they both modify the noun “mandate.” (Yes, “mask” is really a noun. It’s being used as an adjective. We call this using the noun attributively, and if you can, avoid doing it, but you may when you don’t cause any ambiguity. I think this sentence is just ambiguous enough to justify a Writing Rag article about compound adjectives.)

Let’s make it a compound adjective:

No-mask mandate in Pocatello, at least for now

This would be referring to a mandate about requiring no masks! Politically, at least, this has quite a different meaning!

Pay attention to your commas!

PS—Here’s a correct sentence that uses both kinds of adjectives:

We flew in from New Zealand on a Hercules military ski-equipped aircraft.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-priscu-finds-life-in-antarcticas-frozen-lakes-20200720/

“Military” and ski-equipped” are separate adjectives that modify “aircraft.” If such things as military skis exist, and he were referring to them, we would have gotten two hyphens: “military-ski-equipped.”

Headlines are notorious for being misleading. They use oversimplification and distortion, mainly, I think. Many headlines amount to clickbait. I recall a recent series of articles that said Mt. Vesuvius had turned one victim’s brain into glass. What had actually happened was the heat had vitrified a couple patches of brain tissue next to the inside of the person’s skull. A few bits of overcooked tissue is not the same as turning the brain into glass!

This headline is bad for another reason: the punctuation is wrong, and it makes the headline misleading.

New Nanoparticle Eats Away At Heart Attack Causing Plaques

Interesting Engineering, Jan 31, 2020

The first time I read this, I supplied a comma after “attack.” A nanoparticle eats away at heart attacks? It causes plaques?

Okay, I can understand using the singular to refer to many of one type of thing, so I’ll give the writer a pass on that. But compound adjectives should be hyphenated! The headline should say “heart-attack-causing plaques.” The nanoparticles eat away at the plaques—plaques that cause heart attacks no less.

So think about your adjectives. Remember, if people can misinterpret something, they will.

Here’s an artist’s conception of this:

You see compound adjectives done correctly a lot, so you probably get them correct yourself. You could say it’s a deep-seated habit. Here’s a guy who got it wrong:

Well, his mistake is justified. The rule is that two adjectives (or nouns used attributively) that modify a word together should be hyphenated. So we have the five-second rule about dropped food.

An adverb-adjective pair, though, usually isn’t hyphenated because the adverb modifies just the adjective. For example, we can have a very dark night, or a thoroughly spoiled custard. And “after holiday” is an adverb-adjective pair.

But sometimes that adverb-adjective pair just makes more sense as a compound adjective. “After” is an adverb, but he’s not saying that he’s doing something after the holiday; he’s saying that the bills are the after-holiday type. So here we have the uncommon case of an adverb-adjective compound.

It’s a judgement call, so think when you write.

The rule about hyphenating compound words is that the hyphen tends to go away if the word is common enough. We used to write “to-day” instead of “today,” for example. A more recent change is “web site” to “website,” now unhyphenated even when used as a compound adjective. 

Here’s one that should definitely still get the hyphen:

On April 30, the Pu‘u ‘O‘o crater on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, suddenly collapsed. It was the starting point for the volcano’s monthslong eruption, which went on to produce 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of lava that transformed the landscape and ultimately destroyed 700 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/science/kilauea-hawaii-volcano-eruption.html

That’s a months-long eruption. That “nthsl” is just too long, and besides, where does the “s” go? I’m not aware of anything called a “slong.” It’s a good thing that the sentence didn’t have “swimmingpoolsworth.”

Remember, the goal of expository writing is to be clear. Try not to have bumps in your readers’ road.

PS—Those apostrophes in P’u ‘O’o aren’t contractions. They represent glottal stops, which English uses, but doesn’t have a letter for.