The World’s Only Blog Post About Jessica Alba and the Grammatically Correct Usage of Compound Adjectives and When to Hyphenate Them
September 3, 2009
I have recently been apprised by the celebrity press that Jessica, Cash, and Honor Do Their Weekend Thing in LA. Resultantly, I would like to discuss compound adjectives and when to hyphenate them.
Say you want to modify a noun with two adjectives:
My, what a large, rigid Maypole you have there.
I am trying to make my mark on the small women’s hosiery industry.
I’m late to a dalliance with a smoking hot librarian.
In the first example, both large and rigid modify Maypole. No problems here.
In the second example, small, women’s, and hosiery all modify industry. The meaning here is ambiguous — is the women’s hosiery industry the thing that’s small, or are we discussing the industry that sells hosiery for small women? We may use a hyphen to express either of these things, by writing small women’s-hosiery industry and small-women’s hosiery industry, respectively. Looks weird, right? Well, it’s better than not knowing whether you’re applying for a job selling myriad pantyhose to legions of petite ladies, or peddling middling quantities of sundry hose to a clientele ranging from small to zaftig.
A similar and classic example (I can’t remember where I read it) of the problems caused for want of a hyphen involved an unfortunate newspaper headline about an ORANGE JUICE SALESMAN. Poor guy got a little too much beta-carotene? The fix for this is, of course, ORANGE-JUICE SALESMAN.
And finally, the sartorial adventures of the Alba-Warren clan. It’s just a chic striped dress. The dress is both chic and striped. The stripes are not themselves what is chic. Truly. If you were describing the stripes themselves — a thin-striped dress, a red-striped dress — a hyphen would be needed.
Incidentally, we do not want a comma in between chic and striped, because they are non-coordinate adjectives. A good test for coordinate versus non-coordinate adjectives is to see if you could reverse the order of the adjectives and still have the phrase make sense — if so, use a comma; if not, don’t. For instance, the smoking hot librarian (who arguably could also be a smoking-hot librarian) of my third example above is entirely different from a smoking, hot librarian. One is sexily literate; the other is carcinogenic.
Also incidentally, “grammatically correct” (in the post title) and “sexily literate” (above) are both examples of adverbs modifying adjectives, which is a completely different topic wholly unrelated to Jessica Alba.
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