Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HYPHENS. Hyphens may be considered ungainly, but they are necessities in technical writing, where materials and machinery are continually being described under conditions modifying each other. There is a varying degree of intimacy between adjacent words. This is expressed in three ways: 1. Mere juxtaposition of separate words, indicating a loose connection. 2. Hyphenation, implying intimacy without entire loss of individuality. 3. Compounds, expressing a singleness of meaning. Thus: An ‘ore deposit’ is a deposit of ore, and you can drive a cross-cut to find either the deposit or the ore. Moreover, a deposit is not necessarily composed of ore; it may consist of mud or guano. Likewise the ore may not be in the form of a deposit; it may be in a mill-bin, or in a furnace. In the case of an ‘ore-shoot’ there is a duality, but not a separateness, of meaning, and while the shoot may be mentioned by itself the idea of ore is assumed, this intimacy being recognized by hyphenation. Finally, in ‘orebody,’ we have a true compound, for the miner does not drive his drift to discover some indeterminate kind of body, nor does he say that the body is large or rich; he speaks of orebody as signifying one idea, the separate portions of which, the body (substance) and the ore (attributive), are completely merged in the notion of a mass of valuable rock, constituting an orebody. Another example may be given, thus: A blackbird cage is a cage for the songster known as the blackbird. A black-bird cage is a cage for birds that are black. A black bird-cage is a black cage for birds. A black bird cage might mean a black cage for birds, or a cage for black birds, or a cage for blackbirds. Unless two of the three words are hyphenated or compounded, the meaning remains unknown. Furth…
