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Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by zelos on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:29AM (#8752428)
I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg.

"The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..."

That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by heinrich5991 on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:32AM (#8752442)
I don't know, in mathematics we say that we have a K-vector space when it really means K-(vector space).
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by esquivalience on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:41AM (#8752489)
To be fair, "two-week" isn't wrong... but it's in bad company.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by shreve on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:38AM (#8752471)
Yes. What they were going for was "red head-scarf", but that is also questionable. I've only ever seen "head scarf" unhyphenated.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by dghf on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:52AM (#8752560)
I can't remember where I came across it (possibly Gowers' Plain Words), but I like the rule that you should hyphenate to avoid ambiguity but not otherwise. E.g. is "a red head scarf" a red scarf for the head or a scarf for red heads? From context, it should be obvious, but hyphenating "head scarf" would make it explicit. (Of course, you could always avoid the problem entirely by using "headscarf" instead.)

There are some exceptions: e.g., I've read you should always write "Douglas-fir" instead of "Douglas fir" because it's not actually a fir.

Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by aoloe on Monday December 15, 2014 @11:25AM (#8752732)
If you need an hyphen to make clear what a "read head scarf" is, shouldn't you rewrite your sentence?
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by GhotiFish on Monday December 15, 2014 @01:18PM (#8753389)
Well I don't know if this is right, but if I had to guess

red-head scarf might suggest that the flairs at the end of the scarf are red, and that it just a normal scarf https://www.google.ca/search?safe=off&tbm=isch

where as a red head-scarf would be a red... head scarf. https://www.google.ca/search?q=head+scarf&tbm=isch

Dunno. Needs more context frankly.

Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by ulisesrmzroche on Monday December 15, 2014 @10:35AM (#8752453)
Yeah, all of those are pretty bad. I would have complained too if I had read this book.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by Lisa72 on Tuesday December 16, 2014 @08:01AM (#8756898)
There are one or two errors in usage, which are down to the editor not the writer, but the majority of them are correct (if not always necessary) in British English. His argument was based on the fact that Amazon told him to remove all of them rather than giving the book another proofread and removing the incorrect ones.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by Buge on Monday December 15, 2014 @11:29AM (#8752753)
Two-week is correct.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by ulisesrmzroche on Monday December 15, 2014 @05:08PM (#8754756)
Ah, yeah, good point. I didn't read that one.
Re:Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation by pwr22 on Monday December 15, 2014 @11:05AM (#8752636)
I read that latter one as specifically meaning a scarf made out of red head