“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. “They’re not really sure what they’re for.”
The greatest hyphenator ever was Shakespeare (or Shak-speare in some contemporary spellings) because he was so busy adding new words, many of them compounds, to English: “sea-change,” “leap-frog,” “bare-faced,” “fancy-free.” Milton also hyphenated a lot (“dew-drops,” “man-slaughter,” “eye-sight”) and so did Donne, who loved compounds like “death-bed” and “passing-bell,” where the hyphen carries almost metaphorical weight, a reminder of what Eliot called his singular talent for yoking unlike ideas.Dictionaries - English Language - Hyphens - New York Times (via fluffynotes)
Misused hyphens give me shivers.
