Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

A brief New York Times essay by Charles McGrath examines the fading-out of the hyphen.  Now, in my writing, and especially in my poetry, I’ve often run together words that represent a single concept– highschool, for example.  Whenever I see a certain trend in language, however, I like to examine it to see if I should consciously move the other way.

So what’s the value of a hyphen?  The article gives examples of how it can be used to avoid ambiguity.  This use is worth preserving, even if the reader is “good at figuring things out”, because precision is valuable.  (On the other hand, the ambiguities of some hyphenless phrases are also worth exploring and playing with: a high school student hated math, but when the ecstasy wore off, she only hated lit.)  Using a hyphen rather than simply combining two (or more) words has the function of emphasizing the temporary and conditional nature of the alliance between those two terms.  (Or, if it’s a hyphen indicating a word divided by the right hand margin, it points to the temporary nature of the break.)

Thus, I will endeavor to use the hyphen in the same way I use other forms of punctuation in my poetry: sparingly and with respect.  But perhaps I’ll favor it a bit more than other marks because of its weakened state.