I love punctuation marks. Not just the inventiveness behind them (squiggles, slants, dashes, dots), but the way they work. Punctuation marks help the reader know what the writer of a sentence is trying to say.
So I’m very sad to see the fading-away of the hyphen as a mark that helps the reader understand the writer’s intent. Ad writers are particularly guilty of ignoring this punctuation mark: perhaps they think the hyphen is too tiny to convey anything of importance. They are oh so wrong.
One day several years ago I was hit by two unrelated ads (the “sex party” was in a newsletter, the “never” was on a shopping bag) which I read the wrong way.
The Tie That Binds
The hyphen once connected
what hadn’t yet coalesced,
protected words from prematurely
bumping or stubbornly jumping back
to apartness. Base ball bounced
into base-ball before it reached home;
to day grooved into to-day before becoming
current. But few seek connections these days,
except for the kind that rack up
unearned favors or lead to higher-
paying jobs — not the kind that help patch
cracks in thinking. Sex party for twenty
three year olds. She holds you
in her arms and you feel never
before love. Tidal waves
of separation
drown ember glows
of punctuation.
____________________
This poem appears in Barbara Gregorich’s Crossing the Skyway: Poems.
Barbara Gregorich 
3 responses to “Goodbye Hyphen, Hello Confusion”
[…] The first two or three times I read the top line (which is how it appeared on a billboard), I thought somebody had taken three best vacations. Frankly, I didn’t see how that was possible. The vacations could have been good, better, best, but all three of them could not have been best. Finally I figured out that the writer meant to sneer at a particular vacation, calling it third-best. When the hyphen is missing, it takes a couple of readings to figure out exactly what is meant. (See my poem blog on the hyphen, Goodbye Hyphen, Hello Confusion.) […]
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Some of the marks can be traced back to their original use in handwritten (by monks) manuscripts from Italy, Germany, and Ireland, maybe as far back as the 800s or 900s, I’m not sure. They made their way into English and were “assigned” special uses. They made their way into other countries and were given different special uses. Several European languages use <> as opening and closing quotation marks, so all dialogue is enclosed by those marks.
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When you put it like that Barbara their shapes are definitely interesting. Makes one wonder who were the inventors for each mark and how they came about it? Most interesting! Lou
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