DAVID: Hello, grammarians. Hello, Paige. PAIGE: Hi, David. DAVID: So today, we're going to learn about hyphens. And what a hyphen is, it's a little stick, like this, as opposed to a dash, which is about twice as long. And people confuse them a lot, but they have very different functions. So what a hyphen is used to do is it's used to join two words into one. PAIGE: All right. DAVID: So for example, we have the word "yellow." That's a word with meaning. And we have the word "green." That's a word with meaning. PAIGE: Yes. DAVID: And we may have a word that does fit right in between those two, or two at once, like "chartreuse" or whatever. But not everybody wants to use the word "chartreuse." PAIGE: No, it's kind of crazy. DAVID: Kind of a wacky word. So instead of doing that, you might just want to say, yellow-green, and connect yellow and green with a hyphen. So yeah. So a hyphen is joining these two things. But let's say we had a sentence like "Her hair was yellow, green were her eyes." And so we're still separating the words "yellow" and "green" with a stick. But a dash is longer. And instead of uniting yellow-green, it's separating them the way that a semicolon might. PAIGE: Yeah. It's not one thing. It's she has yellow hair and green eyes. DAVID: If she had yellow-green hair, that would be a different story. PAIGE: Yes. DAVID: So what's neat about hyphens, and what's kind of confusing about hyphens is that whether or not we use a hyphen indicates how common a compound phrase is. So Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage, and in the Chicago Manual of Style, draws this distinction with compound words. And I should first say what a compound word is, right? A compound word is two words smacked together somehow. So if we take the-- so once upon a time, at the dawn of the internet page when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was just a wee little baby, you would refer to getting on line. And then as it became more and more prominent, more and more popular-- this is what's called an open compound-- then it became on-line, separated with a hyphen. This is what's called a hyphenated compound. PAIGE: Makes sense. DAVID: And now when we think about it, it's just an adjective, and it's "online." And this is a closed compound. PAIGE: Right. It became closed because everyone knows what that means. DAVID: Right. PAIGE: [INAUDIBLE] DAVID: So you would use hyphenated compounds when you're kind of in this intermediary stage of acceptedness. PAIGE: So maybe one day in the future, yellow-green. DAVID: Yeah. Might just be-- PAIGE: --will be a super common color. DAVID: Right. PAIGE: It's everyone's favorite color. So it'll just be smushed together with no hyphen. DAVID: Today is not that day. PAIGE: Today is not that day. So there's a hyphen there. DAVID: Right. I think it's also important to hyphenate for clarity. Let me explain what I mean by that. PAIGE: Yeah. DAVID: So first of all, when I say "hyphenate," that's just a word that means to put a hyphen in something. PAIGE: Yes. DAVID: To hyphenify. So if a compound word could be misconstrued or misunderstood, you should throw in a hyphen, or check a dictionary, or a style guide. OK. So Paige. PAIGE: Yes. DAVID: I would like to raise some chickens. PAIGE: Good idea. DAVID: So in order to raise some chickens, I need a chicken coop. PAIGE: Yeah. True. DAVID: And a coop, C-O-O-P, is a place where chickens live. It's like a little enclosure. PAIGE: Yeah. DAVID: But let's say I want to buy this coop from a community-run business, what's called a cooperative business, or a co-op. Well, now sometimes, it appears like that, like that, like C-O-O-P. But if I said something like, "I want to buy my coop from the coop," like that, it'll end up looking like this. PAIGE: I want to buy my coop from the coop. DAVID: Right. PAIGE: Or my co-op from the co-op, or co-op from the coop, or something. DAVID: So in order to be clear, it really helps to put in that little hyphen. And that's the difference. So you're using this to say, oh, this is actually short for "cooperative," because it's operated by a bunch of people working together, as opposed to this word, which is just C-O-O-P. PAIGE: Right. DAVID: So you want to hyphenate for clarity when you can. PAIGE: Makes sense. DAVID: So let's bring all this together. So I made a yellow-green coop with the co-op. PAIGE: OK. You all worked together to make a yellow-green coop. That's pretty cool. DAVID: So we're connecting yellow and green with a hyphen. We're connecting "co-op" with a hyphen to differentiate it from this word "coop." And that's basically what you use hyphens for. You can learn anything. David out. PAIGE: Paige out.