Another Example of Linguistic Change

The tendency in English is for words often spoken together to become hyphenated, then become a compound word. For example, “today” used to be “to-day.” And “pick-up” truck has become “a “pickup truck.”

Here’s another example, from July of 1941. First and last panel:

Do you ever see the word hyphenated any more?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Dashes are longer than hyphens. The difference is hard to discern in this comic, but in the first panel, the text has a dash in “day—fresh” (or so it looks like to me) and a hyphen in “fresh-squeezed.” This is correct! The sentence means something like “on this hot summer day you get fresh-squeezed lemonade.” And the cartoonist used a break (which is what we use dashes for) instead of “you get.” If the sentence had had hyphens in both places, you’d have “day-fresh-lemonade,” (a compound adjective) which kind of doesn’t make sense.

A lesson about compound adjectives. Last speech in the last two panels:

When two words together refer to a third word, alwayse hyphenate the two words! So it should be “follow-up question.” Unless one of the two words is an adverb, such as “very.” Adverbs can directly modify adjectives, so they don’t need the hyphen. This can be a very tricky rule to get right.

Putting a hyphen between two words makes the pair of words a compound adjective, telling you that they work together to modify the noun.

No hyphen gives you the punchline!

For one thing, hyphens make English more precise! When you have to tie two words together, such as with this compound adjective, use a hyphen!

Without the hyphen, the man is eating the octopus.