Out of Cheese

William Safire’s weekly On Language column in The New York Times covered hyphenation this week. I’m a stickler for grammar — coworkers at both Microsoft and Apple will tell you that I’ll edit anything when given the chance — but my concept of proper grammar comes from a sense of whether something sounds good, not any memorization of rules. Since hyphenation is a writer’s tool and often wouldn’t make an audible difference, I’ve never really had a coherent view of when it should be used. Consider the title of this post — when I wrote the latter half of it in an email message earlier tonight, I added hyphens where the friend who originally mentioned the strawberries had left them out. The phrase just seemed better with them.

Fortunately, Safire’s column shows that nobody else really has a coherent view of hyphenation in English, either. The best explanation he can arrive at is that the writer should avoid confusing the reader. That’s good enough for me, since that’s what I’m striving for when I edit. Another small victory for descriptivist grammar, I suppose.