A headline that made me weep

Could it really have been 14 years ago? Let me check… yes, it was 2010 when Simon Heffer invited me to the launch of Strictly English, his book on style and grammar. What can I tell you, time does fly even when you aren’t having fun.

When friends invite me to such events, I feel duty-bound to buy the book being launched and then at least make an effort to read it. In that case no effort was required: the book turned out to be well-written, entertaining and informative.

By and large, I agreed with most of Simon’s prescriptions and proscriptions, except emphatically one. I was reminded of that (and the homicidal rate at which time passes) this morning when spotting the offending title in today’s Telegraph.

It did make me lachrymose, if only inwardly. I mourned the passage of something dear to me but apparently useless to Simon: the hyphen. He berated that time-honoured punctuation mark for slowing the reader down. And fair enough, excessive use of this or any other punctuation may have that effect.

Yet God never creates useless things, and the hyphen is no exception. In fact, I’d venture a guess that, for each instance of the hyphen slowing the narrative down, there are several where its absence misleads the reader and makes him go over the sentence again to understand what on earth the author means.

Let’s see if you react to the headline that made me cry inwardly in a similarly weepy way: Thunberg Cleared after Unlawful Protest Arrest.

Granted, the words ‘Thunberg cleared’ are by themselves sufficient to make any sensible man break out in tears. As far as I’m concerned, that infernal child is guilty as charged, whatever it is she is charged with. But leaving the content of the sentence aside for the time being, let’s focus on its form.

What was unlawful, the protest or the arrest? The sentence leaves the choice up in the air but, if anything, it’s more natural to read it as if it was the arrest that was unlawful. Although, as far as I’m concerned, no arrest of Greta Thunberg for anything can ever be unlawful, some arrests in the history of law enforcement have been just that.

I had to read the lead paragraph to realise that it wasn’t the arrest but the protest that regrettably had been found not to break the law. Had the headline said Thunberg Cleared after Unlawful-Protest Arrest, I would have saved a few seconds of my time, which does fly.

Punctuation is there to help the reader breeze through a sentence without his eye tripping over ambiguities. Yet unlike, say, Russian and German, our language treats punctuation in a way I can only describe by the true-blue English term laissez-faire.

It’s every man for himself and damn the hyphen, the comma – and as to the colon and semi-colon, using them marks the writer as an antediluvian fossil. By and large, English leaves punctuation to the author’s discretion, allowing him to exercise his own judgement of what is or isn’t necessary.

The illiterati like to justify their solecisms by saying “Language changes”. True. It does. But what remains constant is the need for language to communicate clearly.

The general tendency is to get rid of superfluous punctuation. That’s fine, as long as we don’t throw out the baby of necessary punctuation with the bathwater of the unnecessary kind.

Thus it would take an inveterate pedant to insist on hyphenating words like ‘fig leaf’ or ‘pigeonhole’. Yet both fig-leaf and pigeon-hole were standard fare just a few decades ago.

The conservative in me tends to believe that any change is for the worse, especially the kind that comes from the widening use of computers and their lingo. But computers, typewriters or quill pens, the hyphen does come into its own in compound-modifier constructions, a term that itself is hyphenated.

The headline under discussion is a case in point, but one can think of many other such cases. For example, if I wrote another headline, High School Pupils Beat Up Teacher, how would you understand it?

Forgettting justified concerns about the quality of our secondary education, did the unfortunate teacher suffer that assault at the hands of pupils going to high school? Or were the culprits school pupils high on drugs? Both are, alas, possible but, had I written “high-school pupils” there would be no ambiguity.

Another example: Australian football players strike me as thuggish. Do I mean Australian soccer players or those who play Australian rules football? (Note that the latter phrase can survive without a hyphen, though I’d still favour one for old times’ sake.) You can’t be sure.

I have many more important reasons (many more reasons that are important, or many reasons that are even more important?) to defend the hyphen from the encroachments of modernity, as championed in this case, and in this case only, by Simon Heffer.  

But as a hard working man (muscular or industrious working man?), I think I’ll save my time and yours. And no, I’m not angling for a job as Telegraph sub-editor.