An article appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper this week, written by the papers science correspondent, Victoria Allen. It concerned Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, who is a linguistics professor at Ludwig Maximillan University of Munich.
After studying 10,000 words, including hyphens, Christina has found that four basic rules will work 75% of the time. Now thats all clear in your head, here is a flavour of what she said. “If a word is a verb, adjective, or adverb, it probably needs a hyphen. Chain-smoke and broken-down are good examples.” Got that? “If the noun has three or more syllables, it is two separate words. Examples here include bathing suit and washing machine.” Hopefully that has cleared up any and all ambiguities and everything is now absolutely crystal clear.
There was more to the article, which once I have worked out what all of the above actually means, I will add in at a later date.
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