Maybe I’m easily distracted but sometimes the style of a post, article, or editorial overwhelms its substance for me. Most recently that was the case in Albert Hunt’s piece in Bloomberg about Hillary Clinton’s announcement. The thing was just full of hyphens. Here are the hyphenated words that appear in the article:
self-styled
low-key
policy-centric
e-mail
health-care
super-rich
middle-class
Elizabeth Warren-style
public-private
Many of those don’t require hyphens and in other places they should have been avoided. Obviously, Bloomberg is skimping on editors. If there’s a strategic hyphen shortage, we’ll know where they went.
‘Email’ and ‘health care’ don’t need hyphens. (‘Elizabeth Warren-style’ simply should not exist, but it needs a hyphen in the same way that the Elephant Man needed a sheet.) The rest do, or arguably do.
You can blame bad writing, but bad writing often refers to real properties.
What does the following even mean?
John Podesta, her politically savvy campaign chairman, is policy-centric. Conversations with a half-dozen Democratic policy experts suggest the broad outlines of a predictably progressive Clinton agenda that differs from Barack Obama’s more in emphasis than substance.
It’s like some genius took Chomsky’s ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ as a challenge to invent a semantic machine that produces words written by ‘Al Hunt’ for ‘Bloomberg’, all with an audience that processes these words as if they were meaningful.
“A half-dozen” could be “six” and save nine spaces.
Over-reported: hyphenated words!
I think the sentence would be better if written:
or the like.