Adjective Phrases

Word of the Day by James Somers:

phrasal adjective, n. If you describe a car as a best-in-class sedan or a person as a self-styled aristocrat, or refer to a more perfect Union or a slyly conniving operator, you are making use of phrasal adjectives. It's when multiple words are effectively lumped together as one adjective. It's good to know what this is called, I think, because these things show up in almost every piece of writing.

I also want to draw attention to it because there's a scourge of hypercorrection going on out there, where people insist on hyphenating every phrasal adjective: they would have you hyphenate "slyly-conniving" and "more-perfect" above, for instance. But the point of the hyphenation, in cases where you actually need it, is to prevent a miscue, which is where the reader trips over themselves and has to backtrack because they have misread an ambiguously constructed sentence. Readers are smart. They know for instance that "-ly" adverbs preceding an adjective are tightly bound to that adjective -- and so they don't need the hyphen in "ambiguously-constructed" or "tightly-bound." Whereas if you omit it in "She's always worked at for profit companies" or "He was a high school student" or "This English as a second language text presents..." you risk tripping up your reader.

Those examples, drawn from several other good ones, are due to Bryan Garner in his excellent "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage." He goes on to describe "suspensive hyphens," which are the hyphens used for the earlier implied connections in a multi-element phrasal adjective, as in, "Detroit is . . . positioning the new class of compacts as the centerpiece of an old-fashioned, ’50s- and ’60s-style all-out autumn advertising blitz." The hyphen on "'50s-" is suspensive. I love this stuff.