Breaking-the-hyphen
As the only native English-speaker in a French company dealing with customers outside of France, I often get asked to review flyers, white-papers, release notes etc. before they are sent to customers. I am happy to do so, but loathed to be too critical because I know that my written French is appalling and I am no Shakespeare in English. I have somehow become the defender of the English language in my corner of France (albeit, a very small corner and purely because there is no-one more qualified). On several occasions however, I have had to rewrite large tracts of a document before I can allow it to be released to the outside world.
One of the errors I constantly feel the need to correct comes from the incorrect or missing use of the hyphen; I will systematically change the wording to add or remove them as I see fit. It is only since I have been in France that I have understood its importance and how it can change the meaning of a written statement dramatically. The French don’t seem to place so much emphasis on the hyphen, and invariably don’t use it at all in English documents.
Often, after having received my reviewed document, the author is none-the-wiser and comes back for a more detailed explanation. My guiding principle is that it is used to clarify that a group of words are tightly-bound in the current context (although I use it interchangeably with the colon and semi-colon to link together two ideas in the same sentence - but that’s not important in this post). This is a bit dry as an explanation so I always explain how to use it via examples.
Most recently an engineer asked why I moved a hyphen (purely in the spirit of learning to speak proper English like wot I does). To explain (in a non-patronising way, obviously), I asked him if he saw the difference between the phrases, “I work with twenty odd engineers” and “I work with twenty-odd engineers”. Sadly, he didn’t. Someone from marketing came to see me for an explanation of a similar modification. A religious kind of guy, I showed him that “pre marital-sex” could be considered as foreplay between husband and wife, whereas “pre-marital sex” was forbidden by his religious principles. He didn’t get it either.
It looks like I’m going to have to find a different way of getting the message across. If you don’t get it either (or think that I don’t get it), and are as pedantic as me, you can refer to “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” for a more correct, complete and humourous definition of how to use the hyphen.
