Today I Learned

That's a sweet ass-car

I like to use them when words create a unit of thought. Like line-of-sight, and such. It really helps readability. It prevents people from having to think too hard about certain sentences when it's ambiguous which words belong to what part of the sentence. Especially when the expression contains function words like "of".

However, I'm a fan of just making multiple words into compound words, like bumblebee. That doesn't work well with something like lineofsight, though.

As a side note, I wish we would being back the diaeresis in favor of hyphens in words like co-op. It used to be coöp, and that so much more fun. Or words like reëlect. Even when it's not abbreviated, the diaeresis makes it more obvious to readers how coöperative is pronounced. Or any other time where two vowels in a row are pronounced separately.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

I see the dictionary editor they quoted is still fighting back.

I'm gonna argue with the title.

Obsolete means no longer of use, in a general sense.

Just because people don't know that the tool is there, or don't know how to apply it, doesn't mean it's obsolete. Hyphenation still has its original utility, it helps communicate in writing what is evident in speech.

I get what they mean, but the title is not accurate to the rest of the article, imo.

You mis-spelled “to-day”.

there are times when punctuation is actually useful for clarification!

Take a second to actually read this one. It's pretty short and sweet. It's also from 2007, and talks about nouns (maybe compound nouns) that we really don't think and probably never knew were hyphenated. It's not about the use we typically see today.

As an aside, I've noticed people start hyphenating in weird ways, like "I've been at this job for 7-years"

they are a bit old-fashioned

*To-day

A question from a non-native speaker: Is there a definitve guide on American punctuation somewhere? I always wonder about American use of punctuation inside single quotes when quoting a term instead of a sentence, and some other cases where I see different intepretations of punctuation.

You should use replace the - with space or nothing at random

icecream ice cream ice-cream

Special characters suck in on-screen keyboards, and the bastards rarely gave us physical thumboards.

is old fashioned non-hyphenated?

like red tree