![]() A hyphen in the larger phrase-“minimum food-safety standards”-is a little more helpful (preventing a momentary misreading in which safety standards apply to “minimum food,” whatever that might be), but not much. That’s Chicago style, strictly interpreted, and you could stop there.īut a look at Google Ngram Viewer suggests that the phrase “ food safety standards” has rarely appeared with a hyphen in published prose, maybe because standards for food safety and safety standards for food are pretty much the same thing, so a hyphen isn’t needed for clarity. Adding “minimum” doesn’t change that: “minimum food-safety standards.” In other words, you’d write “food-safety standards” (with a hyphen). According to the hyphenation table at CMOS 7.89, a phrase like “food safety”-in which one noun (“food”) modifies another (“safety”)-would be hyphenated as a modifier before another noun. Nor would “rubbing-alcohol soaked cotton” work participles like “soaked” always require a hyphen in that position (see the hyphenation guide at CMOS 7.89, sec. And though the en dash is technically correct also in “rubbing alcohol–soaked cotton,” we’d advise rephrasing: “cotton soaked in rubbing alcohol.” Readers then won’t have to mentally sort out the string of modifiers to identify “rubbing alcohol,” a compound that, like “shoulder blade” in the bison example, lacks Mr. Potato Head–like head,” where the en dash provides a perfect illustration of the principles covered in CMOS 6.80. Or you could use two hyphens (“bison-shoulder-blade hoe”), but that doesn’t single out “shoulder blade” either, so the uncluttered open version is better.Īs for the second question, it would be hard to improve on “Mr. We agree that an en dash wouldn’t work all that well in “bison–shoulder blade hoe,” readers would need to recognize “shoulder blade” as a distinct compound before “hoe.” You’d be better off leaving the words open (“bison shoulder blade hoe”), trusting readers to sort out the modifiers without the help of hyphens or dashes. The three relevant terms are bison, shoulder blade, and hoe, so the clearest version is the last: “bison shoulder-blade hoe.” To start with the bison, that example refers to a hoe fashioned from a bison’s shoulder blade. ![]() See CMOS 7.85: “With the exception of proper nouns (such as United States) and compounds formed by an adverb ending in ly plus an adjective (see 7.86), it is never incorrect to hyphenate adjectival compounds before a noun.” The goal of adding such hyphens is to clarify the meaning of the text. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |