What To Do With Those Highfalutin Hyphenations
Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you don’t know something so you just avoid it altogether? For instance, because I don’t know how to swim, I avoid parties on megayachts. I can’t tell you how many yacht-vitations I’ve turned down over the years because of my lackluster swimming abilities.
How many of us avoid writing words that may or may not need hyphens because we don’t know the rules? I know it’s not just me. Today I’m going to focus on when to hyphenate those tricky adverb phrases known as compound modifiers.
The main reason we know about the existence of adverbs is because we played Mad Libs on family road trips growing up. A compound modifier is what we get when a hyphen connects an adjective with an adverb: a wellknown salsa dancer. In this case, “well” is the adverb that modifies the adjective “known.”
When it comes to the compound modifier “newly elected,” as in the example “newly elected president,” we don’t need a hyphen. Why is this? Look, I didn’t come up with the rules, but compound modifiers containing “-ly” adverbs do not need hyphens. I suppose this is because it seems redundant to add a hyphen to a compound modifier with an adverb ending in “ly.” We already know that the adverb is modifying the word next to it.
Because we’re not sure about this rule, we tend to add the hyphen anyway. You’d think that the compound modifier “rarely seen” photos of Bigfoot needs a hyphen and you don’t want to seem unintelligent when you email the photos to your friends in the Bigfoot Photo Society, so you drop in the hyphen just to be safe.
Adding the hyphen just because you don’t want your fellow BPS members to think you’re dumb is a classic example of hypercorrection. We want to appear smart, so we overcorrect our speech or writing.
Here’s the way to think about compound modifiers with “-ly” adverbs: treat the adverb like you would the word “very.” Although the word “very” is usually a lazy word to drop in to your syntax, you would never be tempted to add a hyphen between it and the adjective it modifies: a very tired toll booth worker. When it comes to “-ly” adverbs, think about them the same way as you would the word “very.” When you do, you’ll impress your Bigfoot-loving friends with your newly discovered word knowledge.
The team from Ransom County placed first in the North Dakota State University Little I virtual 4-H junior crop judging contest.
Team scores are determined by adding the top three individual scores of participants from a county team. The top three Ransom County team members are Charlie Dagman of Enderlin, Luke Schwab of Englevale and Cody Freeberg of Lisbon. Ransom County was well represented with seven additional participants. The team is coached by 4-H volunteers Jerome Freeberg and Travis Dagman.
Charlie Dagman placed first in individual completion, followed by Tucker Stover from the Grand Forks County team and Brendan Haakenson representing Mountrail County.
The Grand Forks team placed second. Team members are Tucker Stover, Phoebe Stover and Lyla Stover of Larimore. The team is coached by 4-H volunteer Tyler Stover and Extension agent MaKayla Fleming.
The Ward County team of Abby Finke and Lily Schepp of Berthold and Daylon Yanish of Carpio placed third. The Ward County team had five participants. The team is coached by 4-H volunteer Kelly Finke and Extension agent Emily Burkett.
Placing fourth was the team from Cass County. Team members are Lizzie Cook of Davenport, and Deegan Hahn and Haakon Kvamme of Kindred. The team is coached by Extension agent Kyle Aasand.
Thirty youth from eight counties participated in the virtual Little I junior 4-H crop judging contest. The contest consisted of classes of four pans each of hard red spring wheat (HRSW), barley and oats. Additional classes included identification factors that keep a pan of HRSW out of the U.S. No. 1 grade market, a paper class in which participants determined the market grade based on listed factor, and identification of 10 each of insects, equipment/ machinery, weed seeds and weed plants.