Opinion: Using the hyphen and correct word sequence

Of the emails I received last Monday, one stated, “I saw the following; No posters here fine shillings 85000”. Then followed the question: “What comes between ‘here’ and ‘fine’? For a moment, I thought perhaps the reader was jesting, so my reply was, ‘my beef exactly’ but he wrote back insisting I give him an answer.

On my way to work, I see that writing prominently displayed on the decorated wall of an overpass built by the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) along Mombasa Road, except that the word ‘here’ is missing. What is evident is the space between the words ‘posters’ and ‘fine’ that marks them as two independent clauses.

 Going by what the reader asked, the meaning is implied. A period could be placed between the words, but that would still render the second clause meaningless (Fine shillings 85000). Without introducing other words (word) that make the warning more specific would still be falling short.

STATEMENT OF FACT

‘No posters’ is more a statement of fact than a caution. Anybody looking at the wall would see there are no posters. That threat of a fine is impotent because the way the wordings stand, even if someone placed a poster next to the warning, complete with a mug shot and telephone number, a rookie lawyer would get him off the hook. Don’t lawyers capitalise on silly errors; omissions, commissions and technicalities to win cases?

Still, if the idea in the sentence above is to warn those who place posters anyhow, then it should read: Posters forbidden on this wall (bridge). Offenders will pay shillings 85000 fine. With the word ‘fine’ coming before ‘shillings 85000’, it could mean anything, but coming after, there is no doubt about it.

In the course of exchanging mail, the reader also wanted to know when to use a dash (hyphen) in a sentence. On this, language experts advice that where any other punctuation mark would suffice, a dash should be avoided.

 That does not, however, mean one should not use a dash where need arises. When a parenthetic expression is being introduced in a sentence, the dash is appropriate. A parenthesis is used to explain the preceding statement.

 In the following sentence; Johns mother-a teacher at Matopeni Primary School- was not happy with her neighbours attitude to education’, the parenthesis is ‘a teacher at Matopeni Primary School’. A parenthetic expression, though fitting accurately in a sentence, is superfluous; it can be ommitted.

BREAKING MONOTONY

There are several other cases where a dash is appropriate. Take the following sentence, for instance; ‘the government has ordered 100000 bags (9000 metric tonnes-MT) to cover the grain shortage in the country’.

To show the tonnage of the 100000 bags of maize, the brackets are necessary yet there is still need for ‘metric tonnes’ to be abbreviated so that if used again in the text in its abbreviated form, the reader would be able to know what the abbreviation stands for. In this case, the dash comes in handy because having brackets inside brackets would be monotonous.

Again, a dash is necessary in the following neon-sign advertisement I often see, to give it more focus: ‘Solar water heating solutions’.

Because punctuation marks determine how we read what is written, when none is available, like in this case, a reader may slightly pause after the word ‘solar’, others after the word ‘water’.

In the second case, the meaning changes significantly to imply it is the water that is solar. However, by inserting a dash between ‘water’ and ‘heating’ (water-heating), emphasis shifts to it as the verb, leaving ‘solar’ as the subject. While words like ‘over’ and ‘time’ can be written like ‘overtime’ or ‘over-time’ yet retain their meaning, writing ‘waterheating’ would be going overboard.

Word sequence in a statement determines how readers understand it. Consider this newspaper headline, ‘Villager, 45, disappears after his fathers killing’. Anybody reading this headline would understand the disappearance of the villager to have been caused by the killing.

 The headline does not by itself tie the villager to his father’s killing, but the story does. A more appropriate headline would have had the word ‘killing’ before ‘father’, thus, ‘Villager, 45, disappears after killing his father’. But, pray, what is 45?