In my last article, I looked at how misuse of the hyphen in writing can potentially lead to some unintentionally humorous and even embarrassing slips in meaning. The specific problem was hyphen omission: for instance, the difference between "sweet-talking man" and "sweet talking man." The first speaks in honeyed tones and phrases, while the second chats while covered in honey.

But aside from semantic confusion, might our general use (or rather, non-use) of hyphens reveal anything larger about our language, our culture, our society?

In thinking about this, let's suppose that most beginning writers are apt to leave out rather than include a hyphen. Does this assumption bear out from experience? I think so-I've been a writing instructor for several years and have read plenty of student essays, and hyphen omission is an overwhelming trend. For every hyphen correctly used, there'll typically be a dozen cases where one should've been used but wasn't. And hyphen overuse is rare indeed.

Okay, you're saying, but that's just a matter of beginning writers not following a rule. And if people don't feel comfortable with the rule, they'll just avoid it altogether. Maybe…and yet, is this really the case? As rules go, hyphen use is at the easier end of the diacritical and punctuation spectrum…harder than knowing where the period goes, sure, but certainly easier than mastering the mysteries of the comma.

Plus, other elements of a sentence with which students often have problems aren't simply avoided. Comma errors, for instance, seem to be equally balanced: you either have too many, or too few. The same goes for apostrophes, which are either AWOL or unnecessarily added…sometimes within the same essay. And students generally don't have problems trying out colons, incorrectly or not.

So we might expect to see more hyphens then we're getting-fine. But why aren't we seeing them? What's stopping people from joining words together to form new concepts, even "incorrectly"? I think it has something to do with the nature of the English language itself, and maybe even the nature of our American culture.

English is well-known for its "linguaphagic," adaptable tendencies, readily absorbing contributions from other languages through the centuries. Along with other languages such as Russian, English also has an enormous pool of words that can make for amazingly nuanced and poetic meaning. Yet despite these characteristics (or maybe because of them) English doesn't seem to be particularly amenable to creating new words from old, at least in the way that other languages tend to do.

An example will help. A piece of meat between two slices of bread (in various permutations) is a "sandwich" in English, named, as we all know, after the Earl of Sandwich, who was supposedly too busy gambling to bother with a proper sit-down meal. "Sandwich" is a good example of an English word spontaneously appearing without any sort of ancestry from other words ("hamburger" is another good example). The elements of "sandwich," "sand" and "wich," have no essential connection with a ham-and-swiss on rye. So what, you may be thinking. But the thing is, with other languages, the same concept evolved to some degree out of previous words that do have a connection.

The word for "sandwich" in Russian is "butrbrod"; in Latvian, it's "sviestmaize." Both translate literally to mean "butter-bread"…which is the same as the German translation for "sandwich" as well. There's a sense here of combining known words to create a singularly new concept, blocks assembled together to form something larger.

Latvian also provides some other interesting contrasts to English in this regard. "Pilseta," for instance, is the Latvian word for "town." Now, do you know whence the word "town" arose in English? I don't. To me, it's just a separate word, unconnected to anything that may have come before. But a Latvian knows where "pilseta" comes from: the words "pils" and "seta," which translate to "castle" and "courtyard," respectively. Put it all together, and the Latvian word for "town" has a social, historical, and morphological evolution that all make sense, a sense that's generally lost to all but etymological fanatics with the English word.

Here's another example. I'm at a loss as to where the word "pen" comes from-maybe it's related to "pencil" somehow, but that's where the connection to anything more ends. For "pen," Latvian offers up "pildspalva." Translation? From "pild" and "spalva," we literally have "full feather." Think of Shakespeare scratching on parchment, and the etymology resonates with clarity and meaning.

This isn't to say that Latvian or any other language is any "better" than English (in fact, an argument could be made that the limited vocabulary of Latvian necessitates this kind of combining to create new words). But the sheer vastness of English along with its malleable borders contributes to a sort of individuality when it comes to neologisms. After all, why bother assembling a new word from old parts when it's just easier borrowing an appropriate term from another language? With its global reach, English employs a ready currency exchange with vocabulary, so we'll take "barbeque" from the Caribbean Taino language before we come up with something like "firemeat," for instance. So from this angle, we might conclude that hyphenation-that is, the joining of words to make a new concept-doesn't have much of an organic motivation.

English does have words created from component parts, of course-"railroad," "scarecrow," and "submarine" come easily to mind. William Faulkner embraced the idea of creating new from old, offering up such combinations as "mansmelling," "midlight," and "bread-hunger," unions whose very oddness on the page testify to how infrequently we ask such things of our language. Faulkner's mode of invention lives on in rural pockets in America. Jodie Marion, a former UWC consultant, has Appalachian relatives who refer to the "windowlight" and the "mash-tuh-go." The first word is clear enough-it's what a window becomes on a sunny day. And a "mash-tuh-go"? Well, that's a car with standard transmission, whose clutch you must "mash" to make it go…

But aside from regionalisms, one of the few places that word union lives on, hyphenated or not, is in advertising and product naming. Madison Avenue loves tinkering with the language as much as we dislike doing so colloquially, thus giving us the Dustbuster, the Walkman, Funions, and Fruitopia. Because these are artificial constructions, however-in the sense that they're consciously manufactured to describe single trademarked products-their utility as neologisms is limited. Yeah, any cassette player with headphones will be called a Walkman, but since the word itself didn't necessarily evolve out of its components, it's a dead-end concept, except for future advertising accretion: the Discman, for instance, and whatever else advancing technology might birth down the road.

Similarly, political scandal allows for creative word union-so we get terms like Travelgate, WhiteWatergate, and Monicagate, the unholy offspring of that grand sire of scandal, Watergate. But even these combinations are based on social context, not the meaning inherent in the language. "Gate" as a word or a suffix has no etymological relationship to political chicanery or misdeed, except what has been assigned it by journalists and fortune. Only history buffs, haters of Microsoft, and Oliver Stone might argue otherwise, pointing perhaps to the battle of Thermopylae (translation from Greek: "heat gates") where Hannibal met his fate, as well as to computer overlord Bill Gates, as evidence of some conspiratorial, cataclysmic meaning in the word.

Outside of advertising and Beltway lingo, however, we just don't do much anymore with building new words from old. "Hogshead," "tallboy," and "catamount" linger on from previous centuries, mostly as curiosity. "Horsepower" still has some vitality…once it was taken over, again, by the advertisers of pick-up trucks and sportscars. But beyond the use of prefixes, suffixes, and roots, there's not an overabundance of new word combinations that arise through common parlance…and it's interesting that the examples above have been around for at least a hundred years or more. Because another possibility for the under-use of hyphens may be the modern society we live in.

The most obvious cultural controversy about hyphen non-use is a socio-political backlash: the argument that the hyphen in descriptors such as "African-American" emphasizes difference rather than commonality. Why use a hyphen at all, goes the argument-can't we all just be "Americans" and be done with it? Whether defined as a politically correct marker or a vital linking agent, the poor hyphen caught in the middle of this debate becomes a charged symbol that might be better avoided entirely by the casual writer, lest some faction or another take offense.

Issues of identity may give us more clues to the reclusive nature of the hyphen. We may be a nation of united states, but culturally, Americans are strongly individualistic. For instance, to us, automobiles aren't just transportation tools, they're integral to our sense of separate selves. We might take the bus or subway when we're in the big city, but for many of us, our cars define us like a second skin. We trick 'em out with flashy accessories, give them names, drive them as extensions of our own bodies and personalities. They emphasize our separateness, our uniqueness, our unrestrained individualism, and for a lot of us, our sexuality: as Young M.C. once so aptly noted, "You got no money and you got no car/ You got no woman, and there you are."

The American male's sense of self can be traced back to the frontier and the ultimate loner/individual. The cowboy. The colonial adventurer. The drifter. Short on talk, long on action, this fella needed nothing to survive but his wits and his brawn…and, of course, his trusty horse and/or dog. He certainly didn't need a community, a village, or a support group to help him through life, beyond a few other crusty cowhands and saloon-dwellers as drinking buddies. To this outrider, the niceties of civilized life were nothing but a soft and decorated prison, populated with womenfolk who only wanted to shackle his free-bird nature. This American cowboy-rebel ethos extends from Davy Crockett to James Dean to Clint Eastwood to Kid Rock, and it's the backbone of our media-enhanced and consumer-driven images of masculinity. The middle-aged accountant with spreading waistline, callus-free palms, and a portfolio of balanced mutual funds can still find the frontier in his Nissan Frontier, with its "256 horses" under the hood. Individuality and the cowboy spirit still thrives…but by this doctrine, a man who relies on others or is dedicated to communal rather than egoic values may seem suspiciously "unmanly."

But this isn't just a male phenomenon. A brand of radical feminism praises this same sort of rebel distance and separation, pushing women to a social frontier as well. A "modern woman" by these standards need not rely on anyone save herself to succeed, to be happy, to find fulfillment. She needs no one…certainly not a man, or even a community to rely upon, contribute to, or be a member of-these things are all connections, after all, that symbolize the patriarchal oppression women have suffered under for ages, and so must be avoided.

Modern American men and women have a cultural legacy of separation as part of their identity. Moreover, the modern lifestyle continues to evolve towards anomie and alienation for many. We drive to work as separate units, labor in cubicles, come home to neighbor-less apartments and homes, and then, through the television, share in an artificial, illusionary community with sitcom characters and Regis Philbin. This is an extreme depiction, of course, but the concept of separation in modern American life is ingrained.

So what does this have to do with the lowly hyphen? Well, continue out on this fanciful limb with me here. If a hyphen connects, and yet we're all about individualism and separation in so many ways, could these conflicting forces unconsciously limit its use? After all, there might be something a little socialist-or, eek! downright communist-about the function of that little line. In this culture, "what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours" summarizes a basic notion of property essential to capitalism. Merging our property for the sake of a larger construct begins to sound a lot like collectivism and the Red Menace…but that's basically what a hyphen is meant to do: merge separate elements into a larger idea. And if language makes meaning, establishes relationships, and generates a matrix of power through defining what is worthy, then the use of language is inherently political anyway. Our words are our property, our social tender, our negotiating chips. Conflating two words to form something new by dropping in that communal hyphen might send uncomfortable ripples across the surface of our political, social, and historical psyches.

The hyphen: nexus of forces, crossroads of ideology, center of self-image, political hot potato. Is it any wonder young writers hesitate in using such a powerful and controversial device?