question about hyphens

10:07 Dec 7, 2009 

I suspect you missed it, Barbara.

09:44 Dec 7, 2009 

I cannot agree with "two years and a half", which I find sounds and looks practically Victorian. "Two and a half years" is, I believe, the current usage. Much as I appreciate Fowler, language has changed since then. (My copy is the 2003 re-issue of the 1926 1st Edition - sadly, now in paperback.)

07:05 Dec 7, 2009 

about Kiwis' linguistic skills! They are also largely responsible for the SOED, I understand.

23:41 Dec 6, 2009 

What Sir Ernest did could be considered an update, but R.W. Burchfield (a Kiwi, incidentally) simply wrote a new book. The "New Fowler's Modern English Usage" is a brand extension by the publisher.
All three are worth having, IMHO.

23:35 Dec 6, 2009 

you will surely go mad." (Oxford University Press style manual)

Two-and-a-half-year hiatus, or a hiatus of two years and a half. :-)

13:10 Dec 6, 2009 

It's updated from time to time. My second edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, dates from 1965 and I understand there's been at least one revised edition since. Excellent reading for those who don't know it, with a good amount of dry humour.

12:11 Dec 6, 2009 

I am persuaded: see note added to my answer above. Though usage has changed since Fowler and the English language is not totally rule-governed, it may have been an individual preference step too far (not a step-too-far) to omit the fourth hyphen .

20:32 Dec 5, 2009 

instead of three-quarter-hour intervals".

20:32 Dec 5, 2009 

as unionists (used to) say. Or as Shakespeare might have said of Malvolio, "If you don't like the heat, don't stay in the kitchen" (think about it ...).

Where hyphens are needed (and this expression needs 4), they should be put. You can't have three without the other, ... like love, a mistress, a lover, and marriage ... No, maybe not.

Fowler says - in two and a half pages on hyphens, also in a two-and-a-half-page hyphen article -, "Carelessness, or perhaps a laudable desire to economize in hyphens, sometimes leads to the omission of one where it is manifestly a case of all or none ... Some petty problems in hyphening are set by the unpleasant modern habit of forgetting the existence of prepositions and using a long string of words as a sort of adjectival sea serpent (e.g. a large vehicle fleet operator mileage restriction has now been made imperative). Those who like writing in this way can be left to solve their problems for themselves. Indeed many of our difficulties with hyphens are of our own making; we can avoid them [if we can, like gentlemen who walk but never run] by remembering prepositions and writing, say, intervals of three quarters of an hour