A plea to grammatically challenged editors – take time out to study what a hyphen can do

Don’t worry, kid…you can always become a journalist when you grow up.

The Grumbles are musing on mounting a campaign to bring back the compound adjective.

It will be aimed at everybody in general but the news media in particular.

Especially it will be aimed at grammatically challenged editors who ultimately are responsible for the quality of their product.

If the tossers grasped the importance of the hyphen and how to use it, their readers’ grasp of what they are reading would be considerably enhanced.

A splendid example of how the absence of the hyphen can cause confusion is thrown up today.

A headline (here) says –

Suspicious fire at quake damaged property

So…what are we being told here, exactly?

That the property was damaged by a suspicious fire?

Or there has been a suspicious fire at a property that had been damaged in an earthquake?

It was great to see the comma-nists at war, but Vampire Weekend puts things in perspective

Praise be, the sky will not fall in and the world will not end tomorrow, although Alf is aware of what Harold Camping is predicting and will feel much cheerier about he future if we are still here on October 12.

Mind you, Harold wasn’t in good shape last time Alf checked, and so he might not make it through to October 11 to bask in the satisfaction he was right, if that’s the way things turn out.

But let’s not digress.

The world will not end immediately.

And the Oxford comma has not been snuffed.

But it looked like touch and go for a while.