The mirror., 1923-11-22
MEET MIR. HYPHEN
Selected

nypnen, some may dCnlcVc lC-Dut 10 IuOSt
of US it remains mystery, more or less
vexatious. You may write "clothes line"
"clothes-line" or "clothesline," and be
comfortably certain that your reader will
know just what you mean. Context would
be pretty sure to fix the significance of
"sound values" or "sound-values," which
ever way it might be written in COM
position but the first, standing alone,
would convey to the "average" reader the
meaning "values that are sound" in the
sense of "safe and sure" while the second,
similarly unsupported by text would
mean, to ninety-nine of any hundred
readers, "values in terms of sound" Put
another way, "sound values" is two separ-
ate and distinct words, a noun and its
qualifying adjective; "sound-values" is
two nouns welded into single nominal
sense. The hyphen "does something to
the two words. You don't have to be
photographer to- see that, and to see just
what it does to them, how it changes the
meaning.
Another example is "poor house" and
"poorhouse'': house poorly built, and
house built and maintained by the public
as shelter for persons too poor to buy
or rent house for themselves. A person
may live all his life in poor house, and
hold up his head and be happy; but dread
of the poorhouse is universal. Distinction
between the writings "poorhouse" and
"poor-house" may be too delicate mat
ter of discrimination for plain John
Smith, but he does perceive definite and
significant distinction between these two
forms on the one side and the two separ-
ate words "poor house," on the other.
In recent reading came upon this: "To
pay back dividend debts" Your average
reader, again, would not feel quite sure,
at first glance, whether this meant that
dividend debts were to be paid back, or
that debts of "back" dividends were to
be paid. Write it Ito pay back dividend
debts" and there can be only one meaning.
Moreover, if every writer intending to
convey this idea were invariably to indi-
cate it by using the hyphen, the other form
would be equally free from susceptibility
to misinterpretation.
In another book this was encountered:
"It was already making paving and build
ing bricks" The words as they stand
have only one honest grammatical sense;
that it, the town, was already engaged in
the two activities (1) of making pave
ment and (2) of building bricks. "Pav-
ing" may be either participle or noun,
and the same is true of "building" The
sense meant to be conveyed, however, is
that the town was engaged in the single
activity of making a product with two
uses: bricks for use as pavement, and
bricks for use in building. The readers
uptake would have been facilitated and
accelerated, made more easy and more
speedy, by use of hyphens, thus: "It was
already making paving-and building
bricks" More simple still, of course, would
be the form: "It was making bricks for
paving and for building"
Again, in another new novel, "lounging
chairs on the piazza" is not ambiguous, for
no reader can seriously query whether the
chairs themselves were lounging or were
available for use by people who might
wish to lounge in them. But a reader not
himself, like the story, of the Wild West,
might reasonably enough stub his mind on
this exactly similar form in the same book:
"The men led the more docile creatures
round the circle of the breaking track"
Why was the track breaking? No-of
course, it's breaking-track, track used
in the breaking of horses.
These quotations do nothing but increase
the vexation, unless we draw from them
a conclusion applicable to similar in
stances. The conclusion is this: The min