Hyphens: A Guide for the 21st Century
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About this ebook
This little guide notes that "Hyphens are seldom really important. Everybody screws up the rules all the time and few airplanes are falling out of the sky because of it."
Then it tells you how hyphens can be used and abused. It also has a nifty illustration of a man-eating fish attacking a man eating fish.
Lenny Everson
List of Completed Works by Lenny Everson (As of November, 2014, over 36,000 copies of Lenny's works have been downloaded.) Novels •Death On a Small, Dark Lake. 67,700 words. Our hero snags a body in a remote lake. •Death on a Rocky Little Island 71,500 words. Our hero convinces a friend to take a canoeing trip to the 30,000 islands. •Mount Moriah 50,000 words. A strange sequence events involves a priest, a poet, a CSIS agent, a space alien, four horny teens, among others. My most fun fiction. •Last Exit to Pine Lake. 45,000 words. A dying writer goes back into the bush to off himself. Grimly literary. My best fiction. •Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees. As much fun as Mount Moriah! •Marley Was Dead: A Christmas Carol Mystery Novelettes •Granite and Dry Blood. 9,700 words. Our hero wants to write a book on Massassauga Park. Various people would prefer that he didn’t. •Death on a Foggy Spring Portage. 11,800 words. One member of a paddling group is found dead on a muddy portage. Screenplays •Murder on a Foggy Spring Portage. One member of a paddling group is found dead on a muddy portage. Plays •Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont. Ghosts of the two Métis leaders meet in today’s world to remember their lives. A short (20-minute) play for two actors. Full-Length Poetry Books •The Minor Odyssey of Lollie Heronfeathers Singer. A middle-aged woman tries to connect with her aboriginal ancestry. •In The Tavern of Lost Souls. Four poets meet at a grungy bar once a month to give their poetic answers to random questions. •Love in a Canoe. A set of five chapbooks and a songbook about the love of canoeing. With illustrations. •Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont are Dead. Ghosts of the two Métis leaders meet in today’s world to remember their lives. Includes the play. Poetry Chapbooks •Encounter in a Small, Old Cemetery. Autumn. Midnight. Poet visits a small, old private graveyard. Best poem I ever wrote. •Fire and Ashes. Poems about life’s flames and regrets. •The Empty Tarmac of a Long-Abandoned Airport. Poems about having a midlife crisis. •Love Poems A compilation •Pray for Me: 22 Poems Probably Slandering God and Jesus •Ballads from an Unlucky Fisherman: Poems from a fisherman •Tweetable Limericks. 60 limericks small enough to be tweets •Hiking Poems. Co-Authored Poetry Chapbooks •Who Would Be a God? Susan Ioannou and Lenny debate the merits of being a god. •How to Dance Naked in the Moonlight. Katherine L. Gordon (Celtic pagan) and Lenny (skeptic) confront the ceremony. •Cats and Dogs. With I. B. Iskov •For Ko Aye Aung: A Plea for His Release from Prison. For Amnesty International, with other poets. Non-Fiction Chapbooks •If You Condemn Gays: The Bible on Homosexuality and Other Items. •The Architecture of Suburban West Kitchener. A light look at house styles. •The Architecture of The University of Waterloo. A light look at the campus buildings. •Making Tourist Attractions for Towns and Small Cities. Advice. •Technological Solutions to Global Warming. •Hyphens: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century. •Colons and Semicolons: A Guide for the Early Twenty-First Century. •How to Review Draft Technical Writings •Rebecca’s Trail (Grand River Trail) in Winter •7 Temples to Bill Gates: a modern mystery •The Great God Pan - or Not •Two in a Tent: Camping Humor. •Why Haven't Aliens Contacted us? Songbooks •Dance Songs for Weddings Available on Smashwords •Canoe Songs. part of a set of six chapbooks about the love of canoeing. With illustrations.. Available on Smashwords •18 Dingbat Songs for Kids Available on Smashwords I’d like to thank all the people who downloaded my writings. And I’d like to thank Smashwords for making them available to the world. I started out as a poet, and spent most of my life producing poems. Some of them are really fine poems, but, of course, the monetary value of poetry in this world isn’t much. Actually, I once calculated poetry has a negative monetary value; poets are lucky if they don’t have to pay people to listen to them. But I always admired people who told me they were “writing a novel.” I don’t know why, but I did. So eventually, I sat down and wrote a novel, just to show I could actually do it. The result was Death on a Small, Dark Lake, more than two thousand copies of which have been downloaded. It wasn’t really very good, but at least I could say, “I wrote a novel!” I stuck to what I knew best, canoeing and the lake country north of Peterborough, Ontario, the edge of Canada’s lake country. I wrote Death on a Rocky Little Island in an effort to make some more believable characters, but I can’t really say I succeeded. People have downloaded a few more copies of that, so maybe it was a bit better constructed than the first novel. It included canoes, of course. Then one of my friends taunted me into doing something for NaNoWriMo, the endeavor in which a person tries to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I was, er, a few days over, but I got it done. It turned out to be a bit incoherent in spots, but in general, a lot of fun; I recommend it, if your standards aren’t too high. And there are no canoes in it. By that time, I figured I could write something “literary.” The result – with more canoes of course – was Last Exit to Pine Lake. If it’s less fun, well, it’s meant to be. If most people don’t like it, well, that’s normal for literary novels, so it doesn’t bother me. My literary bent done, I wrote Ally Oop Through the Ulysses Trees. It was intended to be fun, and it’s lots better than the first two novels I wrote. I even put myself, in a canoe, as a minor character. Then I thought I’d just write a novel that would sell. For money, like. Smashwords said romance generally sold well, so I wrote Fire and Spark, under the name, “Laura Singer.” (You can search for it.) It wasn’t all that bad, for a guy’s first romance novel. Really, it is, although my wife said it should be subtitled, Five Canoes; No Sex. I again added myself as a minor character. But it didn’t sell, so I added it to my list of free books on Smashwords. You’re welcome. Last fall, I finished another book that I thought would actually sell, Marley Was Dead: A Christmas Carol Mystery. My wife thought it was really good, mostly because of the historical details of social life. It didn’t sell, of course, so it’s free now. You’re welcome, again. As for the poetry, the most popular are Hiking Poems and 21 Poems for Love, Weddings, and Anniversaries. And then there’s the rest. The opinion pieces are just my explorations of things that I wanted to know more about. I studied the subject, briefly, and published my findings. They’re not scholarly, but well worth what you’ll pay for them. A few are getting outdated, but nobody’s written to me to ask for updates. If you want to learn more about any of my writings, email me at lennypoet@hotmail.ca. Like Lenny’s poems? Just type in (or copy) the YouTube address) from any item on the list below into your search engine. You should get a YouTube video of Lenny reading a poem. https://youtu.be/SfHAKSgn7lc https://youtu.be/29dmESWIgrg https://youtu.be/hyYqYhDl35E https://youtu.be/x8ufRDD65_s https://youtu.be/u0Bw6xUcEFM n https://youtu.be/g3PxjmjRl1g https://youtu.be/WCmoGGdLrTw https://youtu.be/IIL7e2cWWVA https://youtu.be/SfbwWwgd5Yo https://youtu.be/ZAuuYEUsMh0y https://youtu.be/Hw4v7RmZqk4 https://youtu.be/BmTywRZwe1o https://youtu.be/lYGmMyxgKGQd https://youtu.be/I8tA3dwv-WA https://youtu.be/yaX9WYb2y3o https://youtu.be/Y1Saq1UZ0kE https://youtu.be/FDBlHLuBmcw https://youtu.be/yTiSQLzU4nM https://youtu.be/On8ClcmNWsw https://youtu.be/L3IwGhkqIKMd https://youtu.be/KhOxMvR4wGE https://youtu.be/R6ybqmVUUCA https://youtu.be/BiiYKsR8YaE https://youtu.be/Y9a6pNuEoX0 https://youtu.be/ZyOn3Smu8ZY https://youtu.be/5U0zTnAw7X4
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Hyphens - Lenny Everson
Foreword
This book is an ongoing work. I hope you’ll send corrections you think should be in here, as long as you don’t charge me for them. I could probably have added a few more rules or uses of hyphens but at the moment I’m drinking scotch without a glass and never want to see a hyphen again. But I should be over that, eventually.
It appears there are creatures called n-dashes
and m-dashes.
An n-dash is as wide as the letter n
and an m-dash is wider.
Many will be shocked and appalled to find out that some of what I call hyphens
are, by some rules, n-dashes. This is especially true in ranges of numbers such as 1957-1988
and in the joining of names such as Jim-Bob knew nothing of the Sino-Albanian friendship treaty.
The rule I follow in this book is that if there’s a space before and after it, it’s a dash of some sort. If not, I’ve included it in this book and called it a hyphen. I figured this would save you the trouble of deciding what’s an n-dash and what’s a hyphen.
If that bothers you, just think of this as a book for the usage of hyphens and n-dashes.
The Basic Idea
A hyphen indicates that two words (or parts of words) belong together.
That’s it. The rest is made up of a few silly-ass rules that nobody has bothered to change.
Please Note
Hyphens are seldom really important. Everybody screws up the rules all the time and few airplanes are falling out of the sky