LANGUAGE CORNER
by Evan Jenkins

He or She, etc.
He, She, and Changing Times
Dale Brayden, a software engineer in Vancouver, Wash., sent a thoughtful message after reading "There's No 'They' There" (see "Singular noun, plural pronoun"). The item criticized the common but deplorable use of plural pronouns for singular nouns, in this case "they" for "bond firm." The solution -- use "it," not "they" -- was obvious, but it ducked a tougher question.

"Years ago," Mr. Brayden e-mailed, "I would have written, for example, 'no person should feel any pressure simply because he was called by the City Budget Director.' " But "he," the default pronoun for generations of us, is inarguably sexist.

Granting that, Mr. Brayden had no sympathy for the faddish coinage "s/he," which happily has not seemed to catch on. And simply alternating "she" with "he," willy-nilly and regardless of context, is conspicuous and distracting. The gender-neutral "one," as in "One should not feel ... because one was called ..." has "a tendency to proliferate," Mr. Brayden observed, and "sounds awfully upper-crusty and stilted." It certainly does.

What to do? In contexts that are clearly male or clearly female, the appropriate pronoun is, uh, appropriate, and we needn't strain to avoid it. Elsewhere, a broad answer is to rework the sentence; a narrow example of reworking is to use plurals -- "people should not feel pressure ... because they were called..." Mr. Brayden said he saw "he or she" often and found it "awkward and inelegant," but it's a legitimate last resort. Maybe, if we can avoid drumbeat repetition, it will come to seem as natural as "he."

Addendum, 12/6/99
Reporting on a poll, this passage avoided the "he or she" problem at a price: "...Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton (neither has officially announced candidacy) are in a statistical dead heat." The absence of pronouns before "candidacy" -- two would have been required -- was conspicuous. Maybe "a candidacy" would have seemed more natural. Or duck the issue with "neither has officially decided to run." Or maybe even "neither has officially announced his or her candidacy." Unlike the generic "he or she" situations that crop up so frequently, this was a case of a real him and a real her.

Hitting Milestones
Watch Out for the Rocks!
Alex McKale, a research and development manager at Hewlett-Packard, heard the phrase "hit a milestone" not long ago and thought it odd. "Wouldn't hitting a milestone damage the vehicle," he asked by e-mail, "and thereby hinder further progress?" Well, yes. A metaphor should work literally as well as figuratively, and hitting real stones isn't a positive experience. Holding that thought, we'd expect to find the athlete in this headline in the trainer's room, at least: "Veteran Defenseman Bodger Hits Milestone." And this poor little guy had a real run of bad luck: "Calvin, 11 months old, has been hitting developmental milestones."

A quick Nexis search found some variation of "hit a milestone" used more than 1,000 times in less than a year. That may not be worth losing sleep over, but why risk the risible? We're better off letting people and things reach milestones or pass milestones, not run into them. (CJR, Jan/Feb 1999)

Honored in the Breach
Brush Up Your Shakespeare, Act I
Here, as often happens with this allusion, the great man's meaning is turned around: "Perhaps it is a saving grace of Russian politics these days that laws and orders are honored more in the breach than in the observance." What the writer meant was that the laws and orders were broken more often than they were obeyed. But Hamlet, who said it first, meant something else. When he described his stepfather's boozy carryings-on as a custom "more honored in the breach than the observance," he meant it was a bad custom, more honored when violated than when followed. Not the same thing, and the pretty phrase is usable in its original sense.

Hyphens
Those Wild and Crazy Hyphens

Stacy Moore, managing editor of the Hi-Desert Star in Yucca Valley, Calif., e-mailed to ask about hyphenation, a topic that could fill a book (now there’s a chilling thought). She and a writer at the paper differed over whether to hyphenate "big city," "beach front," and "ice cold" as compound adjectives in front of nouns. Ms. Moore concluded, "I say hyphenate ’em all."

Agreed.

The classic reason for using hyphens with compounds is to avoid ambiguity. The hyphen links two or more words instantly for the reader’s rapidly moving eye. "Big-city" is a perfect example. A "big city man" is a large man from a city. A "big-city man" is a man from a large city, and the hyphen is mandatory to pull the two words together to make one modifier. "Forty-odd employees" would be silly without the hyphen. So would "small-business man" (which requires splitting "businessman" in two).

Beyond that, "big-city" just wants a hyphen because convention calls for it. And, even though they’re not likely to be misunderstood when they’re hyphen-free, that’s also true of "beach-front" (also reasonable as one word, noun and adjective) and "ice-cold."

Or so it says here. Some decisions about hyphens, especially decisions about what convention requires, are open to argument. And the same compounds will appear hyphenated in one good publication and naked in another. Style, not right or wrong, determines which ones go which way.

Some editors, including this one after many a year, like hyphens better than others do. But we of the pro-hyphen school would do well remember a Churchillian pearl: "One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided whenever possible." (CJR, Sept./Oct. 2002)

FURTHERMORE:

In the second paragraph above, the phrase "rapidly moving" combines an adverb and an adjective to form one modifier describing "eye." Yet the compound takes no hyphen. That’s because the adverbial ending "ly" is almost universally considered to perform the bridging function that a hyphen would otherwise take care of.

"Very" also needs no hyphen to link it to an adjective, by common consent — "very popular singer." It’s just an adverb modifying an adjective. So, usually, are "most," "more," "least," "less" and other such words used in phrases like most beloved teacher, least likely outcome, less complex solution.

That last was published with a hyphen, and there’s no reason for one. Nor was there in "the nation’s most-populous state" or "several more-famous plays," also hyphenated in print. (An exception with "most": the FBI’s Most-Wanted List. It’s not a list that is somehow most wanted, it’s "most" and "wanted" linked to make one adjective describing "list." It needs a clarifying hyphen.)

In deciding whether to use a hyphen, it may be useful — and, of course, it may be maddening — to remember that printed lines can break in funny places. Look how these broke:
1. "…. he was the longest"
2. " …just months removed from the end of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s dictatorship of arrogance and secrecy, along came a figure"
3."…said one of the deportees, Sor Vann, 34, a heavy"
4. "many officials recall how Mr. Bush’s father seemed ill"

This is how those passages continued:
1. "serving of the chief rabbis in Europe"
2. "skating scandal at the Winter Games"
3. "equipment operator"
4. "attuned to economic conditions"

The guidelines for clarity or convention or both seem to require hyphens after all of those end-of-line words; their placement just compounds the problem when the hyphens are omitted. (The same guidelines surely called for a hyphen in the phrase "infectious disease expert," which was a tad risible without one, and "obstruction of justice laws," which was just a tad tough to read.)

The subject is far from exhausted, but the writer isn’t. A closing thought from John Benbow, once editor of the stylebook of the Oxford University Press, quoted in the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage by William Morris and Mary Morris: "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad." Are we there yet?

Addendum, 12/02/02

The last word on this subject in this space goes to John Kilkenny of Melbourne, Australia, an amateur grammarian, who waded through that "lucubration" (as he called it, not kindly but justifiably) and begged to differ with one example. The phrase "several more-famous plays," he e-mailed, needs that hyphen to say that the plays are more famous than the one being discussed. With no hyphen, it means several additional plays that, like this one, were famous. The hyphen seems unusually unlovely in such a phrase, but without rewording, it's defensible unless the context is totally clear.

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