Compound Interest

A compound modifier is a single phrase – two words, sometimes three – that enlivens the noun it precedes: long-bearded hermit, six-headed grotesquerie, cardamom-laced crème brûlée, top-tier media. Compound modifiers require a hyphen because without it the words fail to act together as a single descriptive and then, well, all hell breaks loose. Okay, maybe not, but things do get awkward and confusing. When Aaron, in "Titus Andronicus," says, “What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!” he’s not referring to shallow boys or hearted boys, but shallow-hearted boys. When F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” he wasn’t talking about a first intelligence or a rate intelligence but a first-rate intelligence. Without the hyphen the meaning is lost and the noun that follows is less interesting and colorful. What’s worse, sometimes the meaning of the entire sentence is messed up. “He was a man-eating hippo!” tells me that the hippo eats people, “He was a man eating hippo!” tells me that a man was eating hippo. Big difference. And yes, this being English, there are exceptions to the rule: ly words do not take hyphens because the ly itself does the same job as the hyphen, connecting the modifiers in the reader’s mind. “I am a deeply superficial person,” said Andy Warhol, and we know exactly what he meant. When the word “very” is the first modifier, as when Oscar Wilde said, “Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.” If both words are proper nouns, as in “South American country” Nine and a half times out of 10, when the compound modifier comes after the noun, no hyphen is used. Shakespeare could have referred to “boys who are shallow hearted” and Fitzgerald to an “intelligence that’s first rate.” The only time you might use a hyphen in cases like this is if there’s the potential that the compound modifier will be misinterpreted.

Comments

[L]

"When Aaron, in 'Titus Andronicus,' says, 'What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys!' he’s not referring to shallow boys or hearted boys, but shallow-hearted boys."

Aha!

[Literature Review]

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