A vote for the hyphen (-)

I had a hard time reading a headline in the Tribune this morning: "New Utah Law Enforcement Memorial". I read "New Utah Law" and wondered what the new Utah law was, and then I read "Enforcement Memorial" and couldn't quite make sense of that. Then I realized it should have read "New Utah Law-Enforcement Memorial".

Rio Tinto (parent company of Kennecott) has recently issued new "writing-style" guidelines. Of several edicts with which I cannot comply (because I'm a punctuation purist) is one to limit use of the hyphen. As I explained to the instructor and participants of the workshop delineating the new guidelines, "If you ask for a 'red hot momma', you may get a sunburned woman with children who's having hot flashes and not the 'red-hot momma' you were expecting".

My favorite book on the subject of punctuation is "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss. From that book, I learned that I love the Oxford comma ("peaches, pears, and apples" instead of "peaches, pears and apples") and that Mr and Mrs don't require a period. (Abbreviations where the last letter of the word and the last letter of the abbreviation are the same do not require a period, regardless of what Microsoft's spell check might say.)

Another grammar-type book that I love is "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog", a hilarious history of diagramming.