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Here is an example of a common mistake covered by the hyphenation book that I am finalizing.

A common hyphenation mistake is omitting the hyphen in the name of a fraction when the fraction is used as an adjective.

For example, “His one fourth investment returned more than he expected.” — with no hyphen in “one fourth” — is a mistake.

The solution for this example is “His one-fourth investment returned more than he expected.” — in which we have replaced the space between “one” and “fourth” with a hyphen.

The solution relates to the fact that one writes a fraction numerically as a single entity (e.g., “1/4″).

Including a hyphen lets one write a fraction’s name, too, as a single entity, and one must have a single entity to modify a noun.

If you remember that the name of a fraction has to be written — with a hyphen — as a single entity when acting as an adjective to modify a noun, just as the fraction is written numerically — with a slash (”/”) — as a single entity, then you will not make this common hyphenation mistake.

If you like this explanation, then you should like the remainder of the book.

Please keep checking this blog for the official announcement about the publication of the book.

Thanks!

Proper hyphenation seems to have become a somewhat-lost art form in American English.

I have blogged several times about hyphens.

Because this has been such a recurring topic in my blog, I decided last month to write a book about it.

The book is tentatively titled “XX Common Mistakes that People Make with Hyphens”.

I have not finalized “XX” because I am still identifying all of the common mistakes.

But I can tell you already that “XX” will be greater than fifteen.

I am working on organizing the book around clusters or categories of mistakes.

Every documented type of mistake will include multiple examples of the mistake, solutions for those examples, and explanations about why something is a mistake and how to avoid it.

I am announcing the book today so that you can keep an eye out for the official announcement that the book has been published.

In the mean time, if you have a question about hyphenation, then please contact me. I will review your question and make sure that I answer it — generally, if not specifically — in the book.

Thanks!

By the way: I promise to NEVER trade, rent or sell your email address to any third party online or offline. Period!

I thought about these two words after my wife this morning talked about removing and replacing some floor tiles.

Problem:
Although the two verbs sound alike, only one of them refers to the process of removing and replacing something.

Explanation:
The verb “relay” — spelled R-E-L-A-Y — means to carry or pass along by or as if by relays.

The verb “re-lay” — spelled R-E-HYPHEN-L-A-Y — means to lay again.

In other words, one can not “relay” — without the hyphen — floor tiles.

Instead, one must “re-lay” — with the hyphen — floor tiles.

However, because the two verbs sound alike, one must have the context of an expression or sentence to determine whether the heard verb is “relay” — without the hyphen — or “re-lay” — with the hyphen.

Solution:
Use the verb “relay” — without the hyphen — when referring to the noun “relay”. Use the verb “re-lay” — with the hyphen — when referring to laying something again.

I saw this the other night in an episode of “The Twilight Zone”.

“BEEF STEW TO-DAY” — with a hyphen between “TO” and “DAY” — was on a sign in the background of a scene that was filmed in a cafe.

The hyphenated form of “today” caught my eye.

The SciFi television channel was running a marathon of Twilight Zone episodes, and the logo in the lower-right corner of the TV screen indicated that Twilight Zone started in 1958.

That would date the hyphenated form of “today” to around the late ’50s to early ’60s.

I mentioned the hyphenated form to my wife, and she had the same reaction as I did: “Oh, yeah. That’s right! The word ‘today’ used to be hyphenated, at least on signs.”

I tried to find instances of the hyphenated form “TO-DAY” on Google, but for the life of me I still have not determined how to force Google to include the hyphen in my searches. If you know how to do this, then please let me know!*

I then searched Google for the phrase “hyphenated today” and got a link to one interesting page.

Someone had posted this question at AnswerBag.com: When and why did hyphenated words such as “to-day”, “good-bye”, “to-morrow” and such lose their hyphens?

Here are two salient responses posted at AnswerBag:

• The previous use of hyphens was lilely [sic] an aid to syllabication. Currently, the over-use of hyphens is a crutch for unsure spellers.
• For literal reasons, such as pronounciation [sic].

Bottom line: The word “today” is no longer hyphenated, but I am unsure about the full history of the hyphenated form. The most that I can say is that about fifty years ago it was still being hyphenated on occasion on signs in the USA.

*20090210 Update:
William E. Thompson emailed this tip to me (Thanks, William!):
To search for To-Day on google, I used

“to day” hyphenated

as my search criteria (in fact, that is how I found this page). In many cases, the space character can be used to represent punctuation.

*20110327 Update:
ThatDeborahGirl emailed this note to me (Thanks, Deb!):
It reminded me of “Rilla of Ingleside”, a book in the “Anne of Green Gables” series that I was reading online. I came across a line that hyphenated the word “today”. I wasn’t sure if it was a typo; or that maybe in the original text the word had been hyphenated as a way of diving the word on two lines or, my very first thought, was that maybe the word “today” had once been hyphenated.

So, just a bit of trivia, but a bit I thought you’d like to know if you hadn’t found it already.

My wife and I saw this yesterday while exiting a parking facility.

Problem:
The significance of the caution sign was unclear.

Explanation:
The sign was a landscape-oriented sign above the exit from an underground parking structure, and “CAUTION Large Trucks” — with absolutely no punctuation — appeared in a single line on the sign.

My wife and I had just left a department store, and we were waiting in a queue of automobiles that were exiting the parking structure.

The sign appeared above an opening through which we had to pass and then make a sharp right turn (no left turns allowed) so as to travel up a one-way ramp that let cars enter a street.

The ramp began to the left of the opening.

What therefore became unclear was what the sign maker intended to say.

A possible but unlikely meaning was “Please caution the drivers of large trucks.”, but I could not tell you why I as a reader of the sign should caution the drivers of large trucks.

Here are two possible, rational meanings:

1. “Take caution! Large trucks are approaching from your left as you focus on turning right onto this one-way ramp that leads up to the street.”
2. “If you are driving a large truck, then take caution while turning to your right so as to avoid scraping the walls surrounding this exit ramp that leads up to the street.”

If I were to rewrite the first rational meaning in as few words as I could, then I would write, “CAUTION: Large Trucks Approaching from Left!”

If I were to rewrite the second rational meaning in as few words as I could, then I would write, “CAUTION: Turn Large Trucks Carefully!”

Notice that both rewritten forms had to include additional words but also had to include punctuation, which the original sign lacked.

In other words, brevity taken to the extreme can lead to confusion.

Solution:
Use punctuation on a sign such as this one to ensure that readers know what they are supposed to do.

I saw this the other day.

Problem:
No hyphen should appear in this phrase.

Explanation:
When an adverb, such as “poorly”, that ends in L-Y together with another word, such as the past participle “written”, occur before and modify a noun, no hyphen should appear between the -ly adverb and the other word that together form a compound word.

This is in contrast to adverbs that do not end in L-Y.

For example, a “well-written piece” — with a hyphen between “well” and “written” — is correct.

I tried to compare “poorly-written piece” — with the hyphen — to “poorly written piece” — without the hyphen — in Google, but I did not determine how to force Google to retain the hyphen in the requested search for the hyphenated phrase, even though I put the quotation marks around the hyphenated phrase.

If you know how to force Google to retain punctuation — such as a hyphen — in a search phrase, then please contact me. Thanks!

Solution:
“poorly written piece”

I saw this two days ago in a news article about a new mobile phone.

Problems:
1. A word is misspelled.
2. A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
The news article was about the BlackBerry Storm.

One of the Web pages in the article discussed the data-related features of the Storm.

While discussing the data technology, the article author wrote “The smart phone operates on Verizon Wireless’ 3G EV-DO Rev A. network in the U.S., promising lightening quick data rates and Internet surfing.”

First, while trying to play on the “Storm” model name, the author misspelled “lightning” as “lightening”.

I believe that this first problem relates to sloppy pronunciation of the noun “lightning”.

Second, while trying to modify “data rates” to indicate a high speed, the author failed to put a hyphen between (sic) “lightening” and “quick”.

I suspect that this second problem relates to a general decline in skill with hyphenation.

Solution:
“… promising lightning-quick data rates …”

I saw this yesterday in a company’s announcement about buying another company.

Problem:
The hyphen does not belong in this phrase.

Explanation:
One company was announcing the pending purchase of another company.

The purchase required approvals by various U.S. federal agencies.

The buyer wanted investors and employees to know that it was legally bound to continue to operate distinctly from the other company until all of those approvals had been secured.

The complete sentence announcing this legal constraint was along the lines of “We will continue to operate as a separate business at arm’s-length from [the company that we are buying].”

The problem with this sentence is that the hyphen does not belong.

The possessive “arm’s” is modifying the noun “length”, but together they are not modifying anything else, so no hyphen should appear between “arm’s” and “length”.

In contrast, a hyphen does belong in a phrase such as “arm’s-length transaction”.

Solution:
“… separate business at arm’s length from …”

I saw this yesterday in a TV commercial.

Problem:
This phrase contains a redundancy.

Explanation:
“Change of venue location” appeared in Houston, Texas, in a television advertisement from Disney on Ice, an ice-skating theatrical performance company.

Disney put the phrase in the TV ad apparently because of Hurricane Ike’s impact on Houston.

If the phrase were approximately correct, then a hyphen should have been placed between “Change” and “of”, and another hyphen should have been placed between “of” and “venue”, so as to create a compound modifier of the noun “location”.

However, the noun “venue” and the noun “location” in modern parlance have come to mean the same thing, so this phrase contains a redundancy.

Beyond the redundancy, it is preferable to reserve the use of the noun “venue” to refer to the scene of a crime or to where a jury is convened.

This gives us the solution.

Solution:
“Change of location”

I saw this on a restaurant receipt.

Problem:
A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
I ordered some “take-out” food from a restaurant a couple of evenings ago.

While I was waiting for my order to be prepared, I studied the receipt.

Printed in all capital letters in the middle of it was “TOGO” — spelled T-O-G-O.

Beyond the ridiculousness of using all capital letters given the mixed-case font used throughout the receipt, the designer of the receipt surely did not mean to refer to the African country officially known as the Togolese Republic.

No, the designer was trying to indicate that the order was a take-out order — that the order was “to-go” — spelled T-O-HYPHEN-G-O.

The format of the receipt was more than four characters wide, so the omission of the hyphen between “TO” and “GO” could not be blamed on lack of space.

I believe that the omission of the hyphen is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the hyphen than to include it.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “to-go orders” — using T-O-HYPHEN-G-O — 332,000 matches
• “togo orders” — using T-O-G-O — 3,390 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 97.9-to-1, which is very good.

I still have to wonder whether the restaurant receipt designer has even heard of the country of Togo. Perhaps if he or she had, then the need for the hyphen would have been more obvious.

Solution:
“TO-GO”