When Buckingham Palace announced that its errant prince, Andrew, would be known as boring old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, some surprise arose at the initial omission of the hyphen from his surname. The hyphen is, unlike King Lear’s whoreson zed, a necessary thing; without it, names float, unmoored, unsure whether they are attached to first name or surname.
The hyphen, despite Lord Tennyson’s ‘idiotic’ hatred of them in his younger years, is a bringer of joy. It joins disparate parts, meaning, as it does, ‘under one’, from the Greek ‘huph’ hen’. It is the most comforting of punctuation marks, despite its ephemerality, slipping, fawn-like, in and out of usage. Who now writes mantle-piece or black-berries? This is a great sadness; more so is a general confusion with the en dash or…
