Your war on a Hyphen

Did you know that there was a 'war' that happened just because of a hyphen?

-

After the communist government fell, Czekhoslovakia became a stand-alone country. The Slovaks and Czechs had a big disagreement about how the country should henceforth be known. It ended up in the countries splitting up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In your daily written communication, you might also sometimes wonder whether you should use a hyphen in that particular context or not. A hyphen, though a very small part of a sentence, will make a lot of difference in the meaning of the context.

For instance,
The word 'Stand-alone' means operated independently or self-contained. But you know what 'stand alone' means!
Here, two words are used to make a compound modifier word that has a totally different meaning and qualifies another word together. For the previous example, both stand and alone together qualify the word 'country'. A hyphen is also used to eliminate misunderstanding and ambiguity. Obviously, 'little-celebrated prodigies' and 'little celebrated prodigies' mean different.

Hyphen came from the Greek words Hypo (under) and Hen (one) and is used in various contexts in English. While we use - symbol to denote a dash, hyphen and minus, they are all different (hyphen being the shortest of all). Most keyboards dont have distinct keys for all these.


The most used use of hyphen in our daily written communication is to indicate that the word is not com-
plete and the rest of it is in the consequent line.
Suffixes and prefixes are another form of hyphen-use. Pre-fixing a prefix on a hyphen is mostly again to discard ambiguity.


Although the British English is partial towards the use of hyphens, Americans usually let it pass. They are well-known for omitting letters and taking shortcuts. They have 'analog clocks' and not 'analogue clocks'. British English has highly influenced the commonwealth nations and their English. So, most of the world still uses analogue clocks.
Now, you just have to remember the Hyphen war and you will remember this post and where all to use hyphens!
----------


Read more about the Hyphen War

Ambiguity - something that has two meanings or possibilities and you do not know which one to infer.
From the Latin words ambi (meaning double sided) and agere (meaning to drive to)
synonymous to equivocation

Prodigy - someone with exceptional abilities