Errors & Omissions: The well-known trouble we seem to have with hyphens

Heavyweight grammar, a homophone and a misspelling in this week's Independent

Wild oats, which you can't sew

A business page carried a feature on Thursday about the tech entrepreneur Dan Wagner. Readers were informed: “Mr Wagner is best-known for being the founder and former chief executive of Dialog.”

The hyphen in “best-known” should not be there. (Warning: there is going to be a good deal of grammar in the next couple of paragraphs.) The distinction here is between the attributive and predicative function of adjectives. An attributive adjective comes, usually, before the noun and modifies it without an intervening verb (“a delicious stew”); a predicative adjective forms the predicate of the sentence, after a verb (“This stew is delicious”).

The same distinction applies to those adjectival phrases formed of an adverb and a verbal participle, such as “well-known” and “ill-equipped”. When they are used attributively, there is a hyphen (“Dan Wagner, the well-known tech entrepreneur”); when predicatively, there is not: “Mr Wagner is best known for being…” (OK, you can come out now; no more heavyweight grammar this week.)

µ This is from a book review published last Saturday: “Paul is keen to go downstairs and take Jane out for as much rumpy-pumpy while he can, sewing his wild oats in the stables, the greenhouse, the potting shed and the shrubbery.”

Two things to note here. “As much rumpy-pumpy while he can” is a bit odd. You would expect “as much … as he can”, and “while he can” seems to have moved in from a different sentence. But I wouldn’t necessarily call the mixture an error.

Not so with “sewing his wild oats”. That is a homophone error. You don’t sew oats – fasten them together with thread. You sow them – scatter them in the ground to germinate and grow. The two words come from different Germanic roots, though you may well ask why we bother to spell them differently when we say them the same without creating ambiguity.

µ “‘Opaque’ clinical trials imparing drug effectiveness.” That headline, published on a news page on Thursday, carries a weighty and simple message for editors: run the spell-checker over absolutely everything.

A headline may be only a few words, and you may have laboured long and hard over them. You may be in a great hurry. But still, don’t forget the spell-checker. Remember that to print “imparing” instead of “impairing” is much more embarrassing in a large headline at the top of a page than in a paragraph of eight-point type halfway through a long story.

µ On Wednesday we reported on trouble at Leicester prison. The story spoke of prison inspectors issuing “a highly critical assessment of the Victorian jail”.

We all know what a “Victorian jail” is like: grim, dark, stony and oppressive. For all I know, that might be an accurate picture of HMP Leicester. The only trouble is that the prison was opened in 1828, nine years before Victoria came to the throne. Calling it a 19th-century jail would paint the same picture while conforming to the facts.