That darned hyphen

Recently a client asked my opinion as to whether or not a phrase required a hyphen and I was forced to answer in the affirmative - not because I'm in love with hyphens per se, but because sometimes they just help make sense of a statement.

When I was but a lad in year 13 high school English class, my teacher was somewhat er... pedantic about language. If he's still alive, I'm certain that the way English has morphed over the ensuing decades must have driven him insane. Practically every rule that he imparted with such care to his students has been consigned to the refuse tip of colloquial use.

And I have stoutly resisted letting the standards of the mother tongue slip even a tiny bit. But resisting, as Canute discovered, is not the same as succeeding, and so it is with a heavy heart and much swearing that I have found myself giving up the good fight.

Back to the hyphen. The phrase my client requested a decision on, was simply "cost effective", a common enough pairing and hardly needing the services of a pedant such as myself to answer. It's so intuitive to me, I was momentarily scornful that the question was even asked.

But I thought about it a little more, and it's really not so intuitive for anyone who hadn't been exposed to the immutable language laws of one such as my English teacher. So here's a simple rule to follow should you ever find yourself in the position of lacking the confidence to choose.

If "cost effective" is being used as an adjective to describe some noun or other, then yes, it very well should be hyphenated. For example, in the phrase "This is a cost effective solution", adding the hyphen makes the words "cost" and "effective" into a compound adjective. So the correct usage in this case is "This is a cost-effective solution".

If, on the other hand you chose to write that "This solution is cost effective" then you could use either "cost effective" or "cost-effective" and both will be correct. How come? Because my teacher said so, for one, and moreover, because it's only the placement of the compound adjective immediately before the noun that is actually required.

So you can happily write "The school was particularly money conscious" but not "It was a particularly money conscious school". The latter is incorrect because it fails the test in being immediately before the noun but not having a hyphen to properly compound it.

So there you go - it's not really inuitive, but it's actually not difficult to remember either.

But since nobody really gives a shit about such things any more, feel free to forget I mentioned it. Even if I can't...