Well-, Well-, Well- (Lose the Stupid Hyphen)

There are many disturbing trends in the use of English today. There are people who could not spell or apply rules of grammar even if their lives depended on it. Apostrophes are being used to indicate the plural forms of simple nouns. There are marketers who believe you can make any product cool and an instant hit by giving it a name starting with a lower-case i.  Also at the top of this list of linguistic nonsense is the hyphenation of so-called compound adjectives formed with the adverb well. There is no grammatical justification for such creations as “well-played game” or “well-paid job” or “well-run business”. Let us begin by reviewing what we learned in junior high English class.

An adverb is one of the eight parts of speech. Adverbs modify, or describe, a verb, adjective, or another adverb, generally answering questions such as how, when, and where an action was performed.

Modifying a verb:

• Luciano sings loudly.
• Taylor sings poorly.
• I am going to see a movie today.
• They frequently go to the lake.
• The band played well.

 Modifying an adjective:

• The new razor gave me a very close shave.
• The quickly charged battery lasted all day.
• He bought an extremely old car.
• Attempting to drive through the flooded underpass was a really stupid idea.

Modifying another adverb:

• He tiptoed very quietly through the living room.
• The band played astonishingly well.

 

Compound adjectives

In grammar school, we all learned what a compound noun was. You take two words that have separate meanings when used individually and combine them to create a new concept. The meanings of fire and man should be clear to anybody above the age of two. Stick them together, and you get fireman, which does not refer to a person of male gender who has self-immolated. Sometimes, compound nouns are written as one word (closed): football, butterfly, railroad. Then we have open compounds, which are not always easily recognizable as such: ice cream, science fiction, real estate. Another type of compound noun features hyphens: jack-in-the-box, mother-in-law, a ten-year-old.

Sadly, it takes until college before you get into the concept of compound adjectives. As the name implies, a compound adjective has more than one part: over-the-counter drugs, run-of-the-mill clothing styles, a twenty-year-old car. Any combination of word types can be employed to form a compound adjective.

• Noun + past participle                      sun-dried tomatoes
• Noun + present participle                record-breaking time
• Noun + adjective                              world-famous beer
• Adjective + noun                              last-minute decision
• Adjective + present participle          a good-looking guy

 There is no such thing as an “open” compound adjective. In many cases, the hyphen is there to prevent confusion. Compare these pairs:

• Get the first-aid kit (the kit with medical supplies)
• Get the first aid kit (as opposed to the second one)

• We are launching a special-interest website (a website devoted to a particular issue)
• We are launching a special interest website (a special website on interest/interests/mortgage rates? Not really sure).

• There was a half-eaten sandwich on the table (only half of the sandwich had been consumed).
• There was a half, eaten sandwich on the table (utter nonsense: if the sandwich had been eaten, how was half of it still visible?).

 The silliness begins when people hyphenate adverb-past participle compounds. For example:

• The game was played in a brightly-lit stadium.
• Our densely-populated city has serious traffic jams at rush hour.

Neither of the above examples requires a hyphen.

• The stadium was brightly lit (= a brightly lit stadium).
• Our city is densely populated (= a densely populated city), so it has serious traffic jams every day.

Unnecessary hyphens are most frequently seen in compound adjectives using well. We don’t write things like “The very-stupid driver attempted to traverse the flooded underpass” or “The rather-stupid driver…,” so why would a hyphen be needed in a sentence such as “The well-known author plugged his book on TV” or “The hotel has well-appointed rooms”?

The justification most often cited for the “well-” compound is that well is both an adjective and an adverb (and a noun). “I am well” and “She plays well” use well as two different parts of speech. Proponents of hyphenating compounds that contain well are forgetting a basic rule of English grammar: When a noun is modified by multiple adjectives, they should generally be separated by a comma.

• I had a tall, dark, handsome stranger. I had the Devil in disguise. (Heart)
• The wealthy, conservative donor backed the most popular candidate.

So, the sentence above about the popular author pitching his new book is just fine without a hyphen. Sentence 1 below gets the same message across. Sentences 2 and 3 are the interpretations people use as an excuse to insert a hyphen where it has no business.

1. The well known author plugged his book on TV. (The author is well known.)
2. The well, known author plugged his book on TV. (The author is healthy and famous.)
3. The—well—known author plugged his book on TV. (The author is known, but it took me a minute to think of a word to describe him.)

The same principle applies to other compound adjectives with an adverb component such as “far reaching”.

There are plenty of other reasons to use hyphens, but they are not necessary when well precedes another word modifying a noun.