Without further ado, let me congratulate Phillip Patriakeas (@Dinoguy1000) for winning the inaugural Shady Characters contest! Phillip’s name was picked at random from the set of all commenters on the original competition post, plus all those who replied to, retweeted, or marked as favourite the tweet announcing the contest. Phillip’s copy of Hiatus № 1 will be winging its way to him very soon.
The hyphen, it seems, divides just as much as it connects. This week we take a look at two stories of hyphenation — both literal and metaphorical — gone wrong.
Subscribers to The Times may have come across a June 22nd article by Rose Wild entitled “Rude hyphens are not the work of saboteurs”. Wild’s article promises much to the punctuation-phile:
As mentioned here recently, a few months ago an article of mine was translated into French and featured in issue 1 of Hiatus, an occasional magazine published by Francis Ramel and his colleagues at Les Éditions Hiatus. (A mock-up of the article is shown below, and you can read the original English version here.)