hyphenation
I use hyphens to join what I call compound-nouns (like I did just then). I used to talk in terms of adjectival nouns but maybe this is wrong. I like hyphenating my noun-compounds! I’m not sure why, but it feels neat to be flagging-up the fact that one knows that these two contiguous words are a unit. It may help resolve ambiguity. At the golf-course, you can have green wellies which are rubber boots of the same colour as grass, and green-wellies which are special boots for wearing on the parts of the links around the holes. Is that convincing? BTW, with “green wellies” the stress is even but in “green-wellies” the first word is prominent. One problem I have explaining this is that not all folks know what a noun is, let alone a compound-/adjectival one.
