Larsen Idealog

Hyphen misuse a primal fear

So who’s the proofreader on this banner ad?

Did the shark, um, snap up the hyphen?

You’ve probably seen this attention-grabbing Live Search ad in your Web travels. Did you click on it? I did. And every entry on the first page of the Live Search results displays the correctly hyphenated adjectival compound: “shark-infested beaches.”

Forbestraveler.com, MSBNC.com, NEWS.com.au…. All of them understand that an adjectival compound preceding a noun should be hyphenated.

At Forbes Traveler, the correctly hyphenated headline is “10 Shark-Infested Beaches.”

And of course Forbes Traveler writer Adrian Lurssen knows that when “shark infested” follows the noun it’s not hyphenated.

“The entire area is famously shark infested, some spots more notoriously so than others,” he writes.

Mr. Lurssen informs us that more people perish from drowning than from shark attacks. “And yet shark attack is a primal fear — and a hazard that, however slim, can have gruesome results.”

Hyphen misuse is a primal fear among several writers I know. And given the nine-page entry on “Compounds and Hyphenation” in the 15th Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, it’s truly a hazard of the job, with sometimes gruesome results — mainly to the writer’s psyche, but also, potentially, to the budget. Let’s say a hyphen error manages to get through your *proofreader-infested* process, and the client demands a correction once the banner ad or, worse, print ad is final. That’s gruesome.

Here’s the official entry on “compound modifiers before or after a noun” from the Chicago Manual of Style:

adjective + participle: tight-lipped person, high-jumping grasshoppers, open-ended question, the question was open ended. (Hyphenated before but not after a noun.)

So our addition to this rule would be the following: