ToBE #15 : Have fun with hyphen

The hyphen has come to be the most dispensable and abused of all punctuation marks. On most occasions, it is unceremoniously dropped without wondering what the impact on the meaning is. Sometimes, it is added where it is not necessary.

An interesting situation came to light while reviewing a presentation given to a prospective customer. Part of the slide said:
Purpose

• End User Satisfaction

The presenter meant to say, "We will provide satisfaction to the users". What the sentence meant: "We will end/terminate the user's satisfaction".
The difference :
End user : Finish the user, or terminate the user as in "Please end the call". Here 'end' is used as a verb, an action.
End-user : The user at the end of the process. Here 'end-' qualifies what kind of user we are talking about.

In general, the hyphen is to be used under the following circumstances.

1. To connect parts of compound words.
Son-in-law, president-elect, commander-in-chief, partner-in-crime.

2 (a). To separate a prefix and a word when the prefix can not be used as a word by itself.
Bi-weekly, Multi-tasking.
In the above examples, the hyphen can be omitted.

2 (b). However, when such a prefix ends with a vowel and the word starts with a vowel, a hyphen is necessary to indicate that the two vowels need to be pronounced separately.
Co-operation, pre-eminent.

3. To qualify a subsequent word, two independent words are joined by a hyphen.
He is the well-known philospher. (Here we are qualifying the philosopher as well-known.)
This is my brand-new bike.
The main objective of this ticketing system is to achieve end-user satisfaction.
The steady-state theory is more logical.
The application has reached a steady state. (No hyphen)

4. For numbers.
Ninety-five, twenty-three, one-third, five-eighths.