Half-Asleep

Here, in a nutshell, is why I am such a hard-ass about hyphens.

I wake up at 6:30 this morning (late, for me) and, naturally, sit down in front of my computer for a little browsing before I have to get ready for work. I'm not one hundred per cent awake, but I'm ambulatory. The first site I go to is the essential Boingboing.net, and this is the first thing I see.


And I stare at it and stare at it, and I can't make any sense of the picture. Because "set" is a verb, and "top" is an adjective, and "Set Top Cop" looks like the first part of a sentence, and how the hell am I supposed to parse this thing when there's a colon after the noun? "Set the top cop...to stun?" After woozily staring it at for another five or ten seconds, it finally--finally!--occurs to me that, in fact, the poster ought to have read "Set-Top Cop".

The hyphen makes all the difference in the world. It transforms words into other words, other parts of speech, and therefore it clarifies things. I shouldn't have to stop and stare at a piece of writing and wonder whether it's correct (or what the hell it means): that's the writer's job, not the reader's. If they had used that damned hyphen in the first place, I wouldn't have had my strange, disorienting early-morning experience, and the world would be a (slightly but measurably) better place.