Un-user-friendly hyphenation

In the phrase a user-friendly website, few would argue against the hyphen. It clarifies. You could get away with a user friendly website, because user friendly is a familiar term and there is little chance of ambiguity (though hyphen devotees may call you a monster anyway). But the hyphen is conventional.

Things get more complex when the phrasal adjective gets more complex. It’s a non-profit-making group, with two hyphens, not a non-profit making group or a non profit-making group or a non profit making group – though many writers are strangely suspicious of multiple hyphenation.

But one rule does not fit all compounds. When a prefix such as non- or un- is added to an item that may already be hyphenated, things get erratic, as I detail in a post on non-life-threatening unselfconscious hyphens. Take hyphens seriously, one stylebook editor wrote, and ‘you will surely go mad’.

A further complication: In some semantic niches, we have yet to settle on a default phrase, so there are variants, variously hyphenated, competing for popularity and status – though we can get a sense of emerging preferences from corpus data, as I show below.

What, for instance, is the opposite of a user-friendly website? I’m not interested here in synonyms like awkward, difficult, or unintuitive – only in compound modifiers based on negating user-friendly.

Fill in the blank: It’s a/an _______ website.

The suspended en dash, an editorial curio

Among a copy editor’s typographic tools is the useful trick known variously as the suspended hyphen, suspensive hyphen, dangling hyphen, hanging hyphen, and floating hyphen. It’s the first hyphen in phrases like sales- and service-related queries and sisters- and brothers-in-law. It helps ensure they’re not misread.

The suspended hyphen is not always deployed, and it’s seldom seen in casual writing, but it’s a moderately common device in edited prose. But I’ll wager you’ve rarely or never seen its extended cousin: the suspended en dash. Behold!

This is from Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist: And Other Essays (Faber and Faber, 2005). Here’s the text of interest:

… requiring Talking Heads– or Elvis Costello–style ironies …

We’ll leave Talking Heads aside for now. They can chat among themselves. The en dash in Elvis Costello–style ironies is an editorial nicety often skipped. My guess is that most readers wouldn’t notice if it was a hyphen or a space instead, and some will be nonplussed by the dash if they notice it at all. So I’ll explain.