Hyphenation?
PeeJ
room" should have any hyphens. To my mind it depends if you consider "high
school" a compound noun or if "high" is a modifier of "school".
It seems to me, either it has to be "high-school-gym locker room", or no
hyphens at all. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
PeeJ
Mike Bandy
wrote:
>Anyone have any thoughts on whether the expression "high school gym locker
>room" should have any hyphens. To my mind it depends if you consider "high
>school" a compound noun or if "high" is a modifier of "school".
At least in the United States, "high school" is a compound noun.
>It seems to me, either it has to be "high-school-gym locker room", or no
>hyphens at all.
I agree,
>Any thoughts would be appreciated.
"High-school gym" would be a plausible method of punctuation, but
that's just not the way it's done. It's written without hyphens. By
extension, we would write "high school gym locker room" with no
hyphens.
--
Mike Bandy
Carter Jefferson
A couple of weeks ago the NY Times used a hyphen in high school. That
publication has gone hyphen crazy recently. I tend to use more hyphens
than most people, but there's a limit. "High school" is a compound
noun. No hyphens in the sentence is the better way.
Carter Jefferson
cart...@mindspring.com
http://carterj.homestead.com/
Eric Walker
Right hyphenation, like most or all principles in language use,
has to be done rigorously even when the rigor is not needed, so
that we can be assured that when rigor _is_ needed it has been
supplied--something especially so of marks that signify as much
by their absence as by their presence.
The right form here is, as you proposed,"high-school-gym locker
room".
(That is assuming that "room" is being used as a noun, and that
the entire phrase is not a modifier, as in some ungainly thing
like "a high-school-gym-locker-room attitude", which would
require that parade of hyphens, and so is best avoided.)