‘it’s alex Weddingstrasse’, my friend texted me. My first impulse was to ask for the postcode to make quite sure I went to the right part of town. A critical voice inside my head berated me for acting so anxiously, trying to control and check and make sure everything was absolutely correct. Relax, I told myself, it’s going to be just fine! I found Weddingstrasse on the map, wondering why my friend had added ‘alex’ to the address which could only refer to Alexanderplatz at the other end of the city where there was no Weddingstrasse. To confuse matters more, Weddingstrasse was, of course, in the district called Wedding, so that’s where I was headed.
The agreed-upon time came and went, but nobody met me at the house number in Weddingstrasse. Upon asking my friend for the address again, I again received the same cryptic message: ‘alex Weddingstrasse’. Finally, after half an hour of waiting and furious texting, it became clear that the street was, in fact, called Alex-Wedding-Strasse, close to Alexanderplatz, about an hour away from where I stood in the cold night. Naturally, I went home, ate all the food I had made for the gathering myself, and that was that.
Part of me was angry at myself for not following my intuition, and insisting on the full address; another part was mad at my friend for not being sufficiently sensitive to the correct spelling of the street name; and another part (which eventually won both over) felt delighted and validated: how pivotal punctuation was in this instant! Capitalising the ‘A’ would have alerted me that it was the first part of a two-part street-name-convo. Adding the hyphen between Alex and Wedding would have been decisive, flagging up that the street had a double-barrel name. What a difference a tiny little horizontal stroke the length of an eye-lash (not even!) makes.
Here's your brief primer on the history of the hyphen, an even briefer one on its general use, and an impassioned defence of its continued place in our lives. Especially today. Don’t be fooled: we need the hyphen. This ain’t about grammar, it’s politics all the way, baby!
The earliest punctuation mark is the humble dot (as I’ve written about here). The second-earliest mark is the hyphen. That’s quite something! Punctuation impulses came from librarians at the famous library in Alexandria, helping green-horn readers find what they needed over 2000 years ago. (Shout-out to amazing librarians all over the world passing on the flame today!) Successive generations of librarians invented systems designed to make sentence navigation easier for non-native Greek readers.
REMEMBERTHATTEXTWASWRITTENLIKETHISWITHOUTSMALLLETTERSANDWITHOUTSPACESBETWEENWORDSORANYPUNCTUATIONATALL. (If you ask yourself why, click here.) Deciphering lines like this takes some practise, and it’s possible to mix up adjacent words. That’s how Anglo-Saxon scribes created ‘an adder’ from its original Germanic ‘a nadder’. Some punctuation marks like dots at various levels of the line gave information on parts of the sentence as a whole; other marks clarified individual words such as the hypodiastole, a kind of curvy bridge connecting the heads of two words to signify they do not belong together, while the hyphen (a curvy bridge under the feet of two words) connects into a single wordish entity.
It took another 1000 years after the first punctuation marks snuck into papyrus manuscripts in Egypt until writers hit on what would revolutionise writing: spaces between words. A group of sadly unnamed monks in eighth-century Ireland started to introduce small slivers of air around words, speeding up reading and increasing clarity around word-boundaries. Less confusion over which word related to which also meant less need of hyphens.
But don’t worry: text is still plentifully strange, so the hyphen stuck around, proving to be useful for indicating belonging across lines for words separated by page margins. This habit cropped up in Latin manuscripts in England in the tenth century, spilling over to the content in the following. The geographical edge of Europe was at the fore-front of fashion and ingenuity in the Anglo-Saxon Middle Ages! But it would be quickly ousted by Italy, ringing in the Florentine Renaissance. By the 13th century, the hyphen had comfortably settled into the centre of the line in manuscripts written in Latin and modern languages, sometimes a single stroke, sometimes doubled, always connecting the element to its left and to its right.
Enter Johannes Gutenberg. He of the movable letters, inventing the printing press – basically the Renaissance equivalent of the internet in terms of its impact on text from reading and writing to production and circulation. When letters and different typefaces in different languages still came as tangible objects, as matrices from metal whose mixture had to be adjudicated in a complex process of educated guesses plus trial and error – when the page still really meant an actual rectangle from paper that receives the impression of inked letters pushed into its fibre through manual pressure – in those days, not everything you could draw on a writing surface by hand could be transferred into the world of printing. The Greek under-the-line hyphen fell casualty to the standardising effect of the printing press. But the central hyphen survived, much loved by Gutenberg who enjoyed setting it in his first lavish Bible of 1455/56. (Click here for a beautiful image of the page, and zoom in on the hyphens!). From then on, the hyphen has become a regular in any punctuation pantheon worth its salt.
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So much for the hyphen’s history. What about its use? One thing is sure: rules for hyphenation are loose. Of course, some conventions make more sense than others in the name of avoiding confusion, particularly when words share the same spelling such as ‘un-ionized’ and ‘unionized’. I also love the scary headline ‘man-eating shark’ and the (for our fish friends) not-less-scary ‘man eating shark’. Hyphens also avoid ungainly vowel clashes: ‘anti-inflammatory’ reads easily as opposed to ‘anti inflammatory’, or even worse ‘antiinflammatory’. A friend once texted me ‘no-one’ and I never looked back to ‘no one’ or ‘noone’ (shriek!).
Apart from disambiguating visually messy word bunches, hyphenation is pretty much a matter of personal choice. New words tend to be hyphenated until people get used to them: think of us 90s kids laboriously typing out ‘e-mail’ back in the days. I can’t remember seeing the hyphenated spelling since the year 2006 or so. More than habituation, it’s the increase, speed, and informality of digital communication which are ringing the death knell/death-knell to the little punctuation bridge. Ain’t nobody got time for that no more, and so, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 2007 cancelled the hyphen in a whopping 16.000 words, including such gems as ‘pot-belly’. Sorry, but ‘pot belly’ is just not the same!
The hyphen, perhaps because it’s so slender and unassuming, is an unstable sign, tending to disintegrate and either vanish into thin air, leaving nothing but a blank gap between former word-friends, or it fuses them into marriage by becoming one word-flesh. How text looks like, including punctuation, is closely linked to our technologies of reading and writing, and their purpose: if we write by hand, we’re unlikely to draw elaborate emojis on the page. If we write an email from our computer, we probably remain pretty standard in terms of spelling. But when we text from the tiny touch-screens of our phones, we usually don’t bother about something that takes effort – even if this effort is as minimal as pressing the shift key and bringing new signs like hashtags and hyphens to the fore. When someone goes to the length of actually doing that, it means they’re either a grammar stickler, or they really love you. They really care.
¶
So, it’s normal for punctuation to change, to drop in and out of our lines, to shape-shift. We don’t need to panic about it – and we also need to worry. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news… There are reasons for previous generations inventing things which stick around for, well, 2000 years, and pretty much unchanged at that. That’s not something to discard lightly at all. Here are two reasons I believe the hyphen is an awesome and really urgent sign we need to hold onto. One is that it encourages creativity. The other that it safeguards interdependence. Here’s what I mean.
The hyphen allows a bit of child-like fun with words: you can stick any word you fancy together like lego blocks, generating long fantastical chains that defy the rules of grammar. An un-put-down-able novel, for example, or the not-quite-there-yet cooking skills of Bridget Jones (yes, it’s Christmas, and I need some feel-good distraction!). Or, as graphic designer Ellen Lupton cleverly proposes, the hyphen is under threat to become a ‘nearly-departed’. The words somehow belong together, and we mark this connection through the hyphen, visually listing them together, inviting a change of voice when reading them out loud (a bit faster, perhaps, and a different tone, perhaps lower?).
As Germanic language, English finds compounding easy and effective. My native German doesn’t even need hyphens or spaces between words; you just add one word after the other after the other like beads on a necklace, perhaps adding a connecting ‘s’ here and there, but not necessarily. You can have perfectly feasible word-dragons like Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitänsmützenherstellungsnummer. Don’t even ask what that means. English doesn’t like packing words like sardines, so prefers putting hyphens.
Angus Stevenson, the editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, lobbied against the hyphen by alleging it was an ‘ungainly horizonal bulk between words’. Adding insult to injury, he puts forward the unfounded opinion that it’s all about web design nowadays: ‘And people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned.’ Ah, old-hyphen-fashioned…shouldn’t it also be messy-hyphen-looking?! Stevenson is misguided, though: it’s precisely this supposedly ugly ‘horizontal bulk’ that’s at the core of the hyphen’s power to link and divide. Hear me out.
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Hyphens are ambivalent creatures: they help us see through the thicket of words precisely by disconnecting the connection, and at the same time, they connect what’s previously been disconnected. Punctuation status: it’s complicated.
A hyphen is the simile of punctuation marks, not a metaphor. A simile is when you say ‘Bob is like a lion’. The ‘like’ keeps the two elements you compare apart. Now, if you said ‘Bob is a lion’, there’d be more conjunction. Bob and lion merge in a mysterious way that we’re encouraged to explore. That’s a metaphor. A hyphen works like a simile in that it squarely positions itself between two or more parts, holding their respective hand, but not allowing them to become one. There’s a kind of equality between the terms. Like a double-barrelled name linking mom and dad in equal measure. You can still tell the origins of the new baby born through hyphenating the parents. That can be a cause for celebration, or anger and xenophobia: you pick.
A hundred years ago, the hyphen was bad news for most Americans. Between 1880 and 1920, around 20 million immigrants arrived in the US, primarily from Europe. By the 1920s, 14 million out of 106 million Americans were foreign-born. That’s not a small number! The arrival of Europeans, particularly from Catholic Italy and Ireland, as well as Jewish Central and Eastern Europe, resulted in wide-spread xenophobic sentiments whose flames were only fanned further by the first world war. So called “hyphenated Americans” became a magnet for mistrust towards new immigrants who clung onto their origins by calling themselves “German-American” rather than simply American. Concerns over their loyalty, particularly during times of war, led to increasing distaste for the hyphen and its ability to flag up the origins of the newly-naturalized, and culminated in future-president Theodore Roosevelt’s anti-hyphen speech before a Catholic all-boys club in 1915.
‘There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,’ Roosevelt claims, demanding immigrants drop and forfeit all memories, ties, and allegiances to their roots. Preserving a visible marker of their old life, and insisting on its equalizing function creates a ‘tangle of squabbling nationalities’, the politician warns, threatening to send ‘em back where they came from. The damning conclusion: ‘A hyphenated American is not an American at all’.
Roosevelt was not alone in his hyphen-hatred: his rival, incumbent US-President Woodrow Wilson, himself makes an unsettling analogy between the innocent horizontal bar of the hyphen with a high-treason-knife-crime à la Brutus: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready’ (Final Address in Support of the League of Nations). In spite of the horror of WWI and the founding of the League of Nations (a UN-precursor), world war reloaded was around the corner and hyphen-demonisation continued unabated. After the second world war, the unlikely figure of John Wayne jumped on the anti-punctuation bandwagon, and performed a hyphen-hating song (well, a declamation):
Well, we all came from other places,
Different creeds and different races,
To form a nation, to become as one.
Yet look at the harm a line has done,
A simple little line, and yet
As divisive as a line can get.
Have a listen here. The hyphen is a wall, Wayne alleges, harming humanity more than the dictatorship of Nazis and Soviets:
A crooked cross the nazis flew,
And the Russian hammer and sickle too,
Time bombs in the lives of men,
But none of these could ever flan
The flames of hatred faster than
The hyphen.
The unrhymed, lonely, dangling hyphen.
In the context of nationalism, the hyphen seems fracturing precious American unity, particularly at times of need. But satirists like Leonard Whitcup weren’t long in coming, offering a positive spin on the hyphen’s matchmaking skills:
Take a boy like me, dear
Take the girl I’m dreaming of,
Add a hyphen, what’ve you got?
You got, ummm, you’ve got love!
Me without you, you without me
It’s a sad affair!
But take a tip from the hyphen,
And baby we’ll get somewhere!
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American friends tell me a unified homogenous American identity and culture is strong from east to west, and north to south. They tell me there’s no such thing as multiculturalism like in Europe where people protect and cultivate the habits and way of life of their original home, their parents’ home. I must say, as German-Iranian (or Iranian-German? Does it matter?), I find that a bit hard to believe. Is the big melting pot real or more of a convenient fiction — or both? You can be American and do American things, and also live out your Hispanic roots or Native American or East Asian. Wouldn’t it be erasing a unique and crucial reality about a person if we got rid of the hyphen and its little anthropological history lesson?
Granted, some people might just want to be American. Or German. They might find it a burden to constantly have to explain their hyphens. I’m not one of these people. I fought really hard to develop my hyphens, learning my dad’s language on my own because he didn’t teach me as a child, travelling to Iran, learning how to play Iranian music, celebrating our rituals. Because I am truly mixed (my mom is German, and my dad Iranian) rather than Iranian growing up in Germany, the hyphen really is me. I am the hyphen. I’ll not drop something that took me so long to claim!
At the moment, there’s another hyphen that’s making the rounds: Israel-Palestine or (rarely) Palestine-Israel. The Israel-Palestine conflict. The Israel-Palestine war. Worse, the Israel-Hamas-war, completely erasing 15.000 confirmed Palestinian civilian casualties. This is troubling. Why? Because the hyphen suggests there is a kind of equality between the two terms. It suggests a natural affinity. An insurmountable attraction pulling the item on the left and the item on the right inexorably together. In this case, though, the hyphen does ill. It belies truth. I cannot say it better than Professor Tahrir Hamdi of the Arab Open University in Jordan:
‘you cannot equate the two. In Israel, you have a brutal, apartheid, racist, settler colony. What is Palestine? Palestine represents historical Palestine and the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land that were displaced, dispossessed. So, diction is very important’ (Interview with Middle East Monitor, 8 November 2023).
Is the hyphen bridging two equals here? Is it even a war between when there are stones against tanks, white phosphor bombs, the tonnage of explosions far outstripping the Hiroshima bomb ? Or is it rather a war on? State-terrorism? Declared genocide? The online magazine Jewish Currents uses the forward slash Israel/Palestine rather than the hyphen, visually representing the difference in starting points, and perhaps even the West Bank wall Israel.
We are indeed seeing that diction is very important: there are Israeli hostages but Palestinian prisoners; Israeli women and children, but Palestinian ‘women and people aged 18 and younger’. Last time I checked the dictionary, the definition for those people was ‘children’. In prison. Military prison.
Detail matters. Small things matter. Even when thousands of families are bombed into non-existence. Perhaps especially then. Watch your hyphens.