Grammar Girl here, today's topic is hyphens.

On Monday afternoon, Pat was watching the cable channel CNBC and called me over to the

TV because the hosts were talking about hyphens.

Yep, in the middle of this segment on the economy, they started talking about hyphens because

the ticker read something like, is the glass half full or half empty.

The original ticker had half full and half empty without hyphens, and then the next minute

the words showed up with hyphens.

You could see the evidence of a hyphen debate taking place right on the screen.

Clearly, one person who had control of the ticker favored hyphens, and another person who

also had control of the ticker did not.

The hosts noticed and started talking about it themselves, fun stuff.

It turns out the first person was on the right track.

In the sentence is the glass half full, you don't need a hyphen between half and full.

However, if we put the words half full before the word glass so that they're acting as

a compound modifier, then it makes sense to use a hyphen.

The sentence would read, he was holding a half full glass, half hyphen full glass.

Now the detail oriented people among you will notice that I didn't say anyone was right

or wrong, and I didn't use strong words such as should hyphenate or must hyphenate.

I chose my words carefully because the rules about hyphens can hardly be called rules.

There are so many exceptions it's making me crazy.

The safest thing to do when you're unsure about hyphenating is to look the words up in

a dictionary.

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