Argh! I just can’t stand it anymore! I’ve been doing this purple-bracelet “stop complaining” exercise for almost three weeks now (and am on my record 5th day of not complaining) but I can’t hold it in any longer because every time I look at the half inch of rubber encircling my wrist I want to gouge a little hyphen between “Complaint” and “Free.” It’s “A Complaint-Free World,” people, not “A Complaint Free World”! Oh the irony of complaining about the "complaint free" bracelet. But really!
The general populace seems to have hyphen-phobia. I don’t know why, but it bothers me. My inner copyeditor cringes when I see “a fat free food.” Ack! If I get paid to be picky about grammar does it still count as complaining? We’ll get back to that.
I am hyper-sensitive to hyphens lately because one of my Twitter friends posted a question asking whether the phrase “gluten free” should be hyphenated. My instinct was that it is, but to get some additional information I searched for “hyphens” on the Grammar Girl site and also posted the question to the Grammar Group at LinkedIn. This led to some lively discussion, the consensus of which was that you hyphenate before a noun but not after it.
Why is this? Here’s my best explanation: hyphens group modifiers together for clarity. Say you have a red brick house. Is it a red house? Yes. Is it a brick house? Yes. Therefore, no hyphen is needed. However, what if you have a “gluten free recipe.” Is it a gluten recipe? No. Is it a free recipe? No. Therefore, a hyphen is needed to group the modifiers together so you know the recipe has no gluten. It’s a gluten-free recipe.
Why then do you not hyphenate after the noun, e.g. “the recipe is gluten free”? The temptation is to throw in extra hyphens just in case, e.g. “the recipe is gluten-free.” But it’s just as bad to over-hyphenate as to under-hyphenate, and it really isn’t necessary. Here’s why: when the modifier comes after the noun, it’s only modifying the one word immediately after it. So we ask ourselves, “What kind of ‘free’ is it?” and the answer is “gluten.” It’s gluten free.
So “The world is complaint free,” but it’s not "A Complaint Free World." And it’s not a complaint-free world anymore, either at least after this post. I’m going to switch my bracelet now and start back at Day 1. But it was totally worth it.
