Why we should hyphenate our phrasal adjectives
17 June 2008
A magazine I’m looking at now has a story with this headline:
401(k) Excessive Fee Litigation
This leaves me to wonder what is excessive: the fee or the litigation? The story reveals that it’s about litigation over excessive fees. A little punctuation removes the ambiguity:
401(k) Excessive-Fee Litigation
“When a phrase functions as an adjective—an increasingly frequent phenomenon in late-20th-century English—the phrase should ordinarily be hyphenated. Seemingly everyone in the literary world knows this except lawyers.” Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 657 (2d ed. 1995).