Well - er - hyphens

“So you’re a pedant, eh ? Well, what sort of things are you interested in ?”
“All sorts of things, actually.”
“Sounds promising. Such as ?”
“Well - er – hyphens, for instance.”
“Oh.”

I have never actually shown any interest in the hyphen until I found myself reading an excellent book of letters written by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (to one another) in the mid-seventeenth century, published in 1997 and edited by a celebrated historian, archaeologist and broadcaster. In so many modern editions, the prose of that period is tidied up, with improved spelling and corrected punctuation, diluting the flavour and weakening the immediacy of the original. And, of course, letters then as now were often dashed off in a hurry, and consistency in spelling, punctuation and even grammar was less important than what we would call ‘catching the post’.

In this book (Particular Friends, edited by Guy de la Bédoyère and published by Boydell Press) the original texts of the letters is given, and I take it that this means hyphens and all. Now some of these hyphens appear just as we might use them (‘wall-builders’, ‘well-bred’, ‘Selfe-denyal’, ‘mole-hill’); others appear unfamiliarly in familiar place-names (‘Graves-End’, ‘Leeds-Castle’, New-found-land’, ‘Dover-streete’, ‘Oxford-shire’); some appear in words of two or more elements that we now accept as well past any need of hyphenating (‘gather something use-full’, ‘those who over-ran all the world’, ‘here you will enter among the Vine-yards’, ‘Places where People of Quality dwell are in the Sub-urbs’, ‘ever-Greenes’, ‘else-where’); and yet other hyphens seem to have been sprinkled in gratuitously where they seem to be quite unnecessary or just illogical (‘it inferrs too-much, or nothing at all’; ‘the Greate-ones at Court’; ‘ . . . how suspicious wise-men ought to be of other Histories’; ‘inso-much as when . . .’, ‘Iron-Chains of different Lengths’; ‘those who not long-since offer’d to sell them’; ‘There are likewise more than 50, who being Old-Men, . . . ’; ‘five-hundred sick-persons. . .).

But what amuses me about all this is that the editor himself seems to have caught the seventeenth-century hyphen-bug, for in his Introduction he writes of ‘the English Civil-War generation’; ‘vice-versa’; and (all three on one page) ‘the vast majority have been freshly-transcribed’; ‘lists of previously-published letters’; and ‘damaged, or barely-legible, texts’.

Nothing positively wrong with these: but I doe find my-selfe Mightily-tickl’d.

Well - er - hyphens