Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:Spike the Cat/Quick lesson in when to use a hyphen

Hello! I noticed that you moved "Politically-Incorrect Villain" to "Politically Incorrect Villain" because you'd never seen the hyphen used in that phrase (and because we had "Politically Incorrect Hero" as a counter-example). I've moved the page back to "Politically-Incorrect Villain" (and moved "Politically Incorrect Hero" to "Politically-Incorrect Hero"). In this case, the hyphen is used to show that the words are a single adjective and should not be separated.

The APA Style Guide offers the example "the adolescents resided in two parent homes" (they resided in two homes) and "the adolescents resided in two-parent homes" (they resided in homes with two parents).

The Chicago Manual of Style offers "a group of eight- to ten-year-olds" (everyone in the group is aged eight to ten) as opposed to "a group of eight to ten year-olds" (there are eight to ten in the group, and they're all aged one).

Wikipedia offers:
 * Man-eating shark (as opposed to man eating shark, which could be interpreted as a man eating the meat of a shark)
 * Wild-goose chase (as opposed to wild goose chase, which could be interpreted as a goose chase that is wild)
 * Long-term contract (as opposed to long term contract, which could be interpreted as a long contract about a term)
 * Zero-liability protection (as opposed to zero liability protection, which could be interpreted as there being no liability protection)