A Word, Please: Beefing over how we use hyphens and adverbs

The beef had been aged dry for 30 days, and it changed my life. Not the way you’re thinking. I didn’t eat the life-changing meat. I just read about it in an article I was editing — and my relationship with hyphens has never been the same.

Before then, I thought I had hyphens all figured out. Most of the time, they connect two words that work together to describe a noun, as in “heat-seeking missile.” The hyphen makes clear it’s not a heat missile. It’s not a seeking missile. Neither of those words can describe a missile on its own. They have to work together, to connect, to tell you about the missile.

These are called compound modifiers: words that team up to work like a modifier, usually an adjective, to describe another word. These modifiers are central to hyphenation rules, which say, basically: Hyphenate a compound modifier when doing so can prevent ambiguity. That is, don’t let your reader confuse “buffalo-riding birds” with “buffalo riding birds.”

Compound modifiers can be adverbs, too. Often, these compound adverbs come after the verb: She works part-time. And because adverbs can modify adjectives, as in “fabulously wealthy,” compound adverbs do the same: “jaw-droppingly wealthy.”

Nouns like “mock-up,” and verbs like “mass-produce” can also be hyphenated. But a lot of those are in the dictionary, meaning you don’t have to figure out on your own how to write them. Then there are prefixes and suffixes, whose hyphenation rules are a mess, widely disagreed upon and inconsistent, requiring a hyphen in “re-create” but none in “reenact.”

“Use of the hyphen is far from standardized,” the Associated Press Stylebook writes. “It can be a matter of taste, judgment and style sense. Think of hyphens as an aid to readers’ comprehension. If a hyphen makes the meaning clearer, use it. If it just adds clutter and distraction to the sentence, don’t use it.”

AP’s explanations, exceptions, special circumstances and examples go on for about 900 words, making hyphens one of the longest entries in the style guide. I had referred back to these 900-ish words countless times in the years leading up to that fateful day I learned about that dry old meat. Yet I was stopped in my tracks. Was it 30-day-dry-aged beef or 30-day dry-aged beef? That is, were all those words working as a single adjective to modify “beef”?

“At times, a writer must decide whether words preceding a noun form a single adjective that should be hyphenated as one modifier or whether some terms within are functioning independently,” I wrote in my 2010 book “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” “For example, in choosing between ‘a discriminating-but-value-conscious shopper’ and ‘a discriminating but value-conscious shopper,’ the writer can decide based on whichever best captures the intended meaning.”

Then I shared the results of a survey I gave to some professional copy editors, who all agreed that value-conscious should be hyphenated but the rest should not. Yet when I asked them about “30-day-dry-aged,” they disagreed. Two thirds said to hyphenate the whole shebang as a single compound. The remainder said it’s “30-day dry-aged.”

There’s no wrong answer, but I’m with the majority on this one. It’s not 30-day beef that is dry-aged. All four words in that compound build on each other to create a single meaning.

Most often, these “compounds of uncertain scope” appear in phrases like “extreme-heat-related illness.” This came up recently in my copy editing work with just one hyphen. I chose logic over looks. It’s not an extreme illness that’s heat-related. It’s the heat, not the illness, that’s extreme.

Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion, so longer compounds are getting rarer. But I’ll keep hyphenating 30-day-dry-aged beef and extreme-heat-related illness as long as the rules allow.

— June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.