[Write On!]


Neologistic Hyphenation

by day
Posted to Craft, Style and Voice on Tue Dec 10, 2002 at 10:39:15 PM PST
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I'm having trouble formulating a personal heuristic for deciding whether to hyphenate compound words that are not in a dictionary -- i.e. that i'm just basically making up.

The whole business of hyphenation does not seem like it's done logically...


The Chicago Manual of Style FAQ: hyphens and dashes offers ideas...

what i got from it is:

we could formulate: if you're making a compound neologism and none of the parts are suffices or prefices, then use hyphens. But as soon as it enters a dictionary (e.g. schoolmaster) then strip out those needless hyphens.

fairly lame solution.

but what's better? do a joycean juxtaposition of whateverwords make you feel cozywarm? problem with that is it can give rise to slow reading -- hyphens help the parsability of word-recruits, don't you think?

Full discussion: http://www.write-on.org/story/2002/12/6/1737/07875