Lament for Lost Hyphens

Where have all the hyphens gone? Nearly every day, everywhere I look, I see these little spaces where there should be hyphens. In the community newspaper, in national advertising, in Jeopardy clues, on product packaging, and of course on the Internet, the hyphens have somehow been left behind.

Just yesterday, I had to look something up on the AARP Web site and learned that their magazine is the “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine.” So it’s an exceptionally large magazine about circulation? I’ve leafed through my mother’s copies of the magazine (I myself am not quite old enough to subscribe), and it seems to cover a lot more than circulation. Or maybe I’m taking it all wrong. Maybe they mean it’s the largest magazine that circulates. That might make sense—sort of. But still, I can’t help thinking that they actually mean it’s the magazine with the largest circulation in the world, in which case there really should be a hyphen connecting largest and circulation.

Yes, I know that some styles (notably APA, which I work with frequently) don’t use hyphens in compounds with comparatives or superlatives. This drives me insane. It is almost physically painful for me to let phrases like “higher scoring students” slip by without a hyphen. I imagine a group of students receiving their scores as they sit atop extremely tall chairs. Meanwhile, the lower scoring students are seated on the cold, hard floor. But no normal person would worry about such a thing; no, it takes an editor to come up with an image like this.

In case you’re not an editor (or in case you’re an editor who can still masquerade as a “normal” person), this is the sort of thing editors think about all day. I haven’t actually done it—yet—but many times I’ve been tempted to write to various companies and alert them to the fact that their hyphens have all run away. If I ever get to retire, pointing out cases of lost hyphens will probably become my main hobby. Perhaps I’ll become an amateur hyphen detective, à la Miss Marple. I’ll knit, I’ll read AARP’s circulation magazine, and someday, if I’m very fortunate and very skillful, I’ll find out where all those hyphens have gone. I shall begin my search in the Caribbean; it seems the most logical place.