I saw this in a corporate message.
Problem:
The adjective is misspelled.
Explanation:
The correct spelling of the twice-used adjective in the sentence should have no hyphen.
I believe that the insertion of the hyphen reflects the writer’s discomfort with the presence of adjacent vowels that are parts of separate syllables.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following spellings (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “extraordinary” — spelled E-X-T-R-A-O-R-D-I-N-A-R-Y — 65,500,000 matches
- “extra-ordinary” — spelled E-X-T-R-A-HYPHEN-O-R-D-I-N-A-R-Y — 1,470,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have spelled this adjective correctly versus incorrectly by a ratio of 44.6-to-1, which is good but not great, especially given the nearly 1.5 million misspellings.
Solution:
“These extraordinary times called for extraordinary actions.”