One nightstand is not a one-night stand

A letter to the editor in the Times Literary Supplement:

Gerald Mangan is right to feel disgruntled about the removal of hyphens by disapproving US copy editors. I blame Woodrow Wilson, who is on record as stating that "the hyphen is the most un-American thing in the world" (note the un-).

James Joyce disdained them ("the heaventree of stars hungwith humid nightblue fruit") and Emily Dickinson preferred to cut a dash. But it's a brilliant little punctuation mark that's been around since Johannes Gutenberg and his forty-two-line Bible.

Hyphen-phobes need reminding that there is a world of difference between extra marital sex and extra-marital sex. A one nightstand is not the same as a one-night stand. As E.M. Forster says: "Only connect".

John O'Byrne

Harold's Cross

Dublin