HAVING recently had my forthcoming book copy-edited, I jumped right on the link (at Andrew Sullivan ) to read Lori Fradkin's " What It's Really Like To Be A Copy Editor ". I'd struggled for hours with my manuscript, wondering what to stet and what not to stet, marvelling both at my copy editor's care and at the confusion she introduced in places. So I was eager to see what Ms Fradkin had to say about the other side of this relationship.

The piece starts inauspiciously, though:

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it's one closed-up word—douchebag—but they are wrong.

There it is. A statement of fact, black and white. What evidence does she offer? "The dictionary". Which dictionary? Merriam-Webster, she says. Odd, because my Random House Webster's College Dictionary (1999) has "douchebag". (Three other dictionaries in my office don't include it at all.)

The point here isn't that "douchebag" should be written closed up. Ms Fradkin's piece is otherwise entertaining (read it alone for how she made the executive decision on hyphenating "finger-blasting"). But the attitude in that opening passage—this is Wrong, because the Dictionary says so—is all too common among copy editors, and is irritating for reasons that bear some explaining.

Many interesting things can be said about compounds. They come in noun-noun ("kitchen-table issues"), adjective-noun ("private-sector wages"), adjective-adjective ("blue-green flowers") and other varieties. In writing, they tend to enter the language as two words. If they survive and are used frequently, they often pass through a period of hyphenation before fusing. (My 1933 OED includes only "year-book", not "yearbook", the latter now nearly universal.) In (English) speech, we know that a compound has begun to be fused, with a specific meaning, when the stress moves to the first syllable. When photographers first began developing glass plates, they looked for a dark room; now, they use a specialised room, a dárkroom, which (as Steven Pinker notes) can be lit, just as a blackboard can be green.

All this—how language works—is fascinating stuff. And that's why I really far prefer it to the mechanised assault that is "'Webster's (or 'The Chicago Manual of Style' or 'the MLA') says..., and that's that." In the English-speaking world, no dictionary maker (or should that be dictionary-maker?) gets to rule on these things for all of us for all time. In France and in other countries, an official academy does so, but that is an authoritarian approach the Anglosphere has (largely) avoided.

This is not to say "everything is right" and to get back into the tired prescriptivist-descriptivist debate. A debate about hyphens or compounds should have something useful to say about language itself. For example, The Economist hyphenates compounds when they are used as modifiers: interest-rate hikes, balance-of-payments crises, and so forth. These aren't hyphenated when used as nouns. ("Interest rates must go up.") I like this hyphenation. It helps prevent so-called garden-path misanalysis, by letting the reader know that even though he's seeing two nouns in a row, they should be understood as a compound modifier, and another noun is coming up. In other words, if someone asked me why I hyphenate "interest-rate hikes", this is what I'd tell them, and not "Because the style book says so." The latter answer is worse than wrong; it's not interesting.

In some cases I might disagree with our style book. I obey it nonetheless, because rulings, even when arbitrary, keep a style consistent, so readers aren't finding "Web sites" here and "websites" there in the same article. Readers expect and enjoy uniformity as a mark of quality. We close up "-makers" when they make things with one syllable: "carmakers", "peacemakers" and so on. We hyphenate them when they make things with multiple syllables, so my above query should be answered with "dictionary-makers". Is this because doing otherwise is just wrong? No. Our style-book entry on hyphenations spans nine pages. It begins, accurately, with "There is no firm rule to help you decide which words are run together, hyphenated or left separate." And it ends, sagely, with a quotation from the Oxford University Press style manual: "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad." In other words, consistency is good; "a foolish consistency", Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds", is not.

Addendum: I just have to promote this nice catch by a commenter, AcrossTheStreet, to the main post:

You realize that your example of "interest-rate hikes" violates the Economist style guide with its last word, right? "Hikes are walks, not increases", as you quoted three weeks ago:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/americanisms

Indeed.

(Photo credit: Unhindered by Talent, via Flickr)