A Dash of This and a Hyphen of That

Author:	Gregory P. Epley
Published:	10/28/2020
Rated:	PG (mild strong language)

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The purpose of this article is to explain the use of a dash or hyphen in the word “A-Ware”. There is good reason, despite so-called expert opinion to the contrary.

Allow me to begin by stating an opinion on “experts”. I’m not much for expert “opinion” simply because “expert” depends on factors of the individual in question which I am not necessarily personally privy to. Perhaps the “expert” has “qualifications”, and then again, perhaps they don’t, and I am simply being fed some PR (public relations) “spin” on their “qualifications”. Consequently, forgive me if I am a little dubious over whatever any “expert” tells me, particularly when I am left feeling unsure of the integrity of the claim.

For example, telling me you’ve been editor of so-and-so publication for however many years is insufficient. Having worked in the “real world” myself, I can attest to many people having their cushy executive or management level jobs purely because they’re very good at bullshitting and/or brown-nosing others. Two characteristics I have zero use for. It happens, it is tolerated, and yes, people do “get ahead”, but at what costs to their eternal life?

None of us reading this TRULY knows what’s beyond this life. You can have whatever “belief”, but it remains that none of us TRULY knows. If your “belief” is wrong and there is something more after this life, what sort of gamble are you taking? You’re gambling that whatever techniques worked for you in this life will still work in whatever afterlife, only you don’t know this for certain. On the flipside, if there is no afterlife, then chances are you won’t be aware of this anyway, so no harm done in having believed otherwise for some good part of a lifetime. Nothing is nothing. Even if you are somehow aware of “nothing” for some moment after death (which I personally doubt is possible), what does that matter if you then aren’t aware of anything some moments later?

Sorry, my “liberal arts” background seeping out there. Climbing back on my earlier train of thought, whatever some “expert” says could simply be their “opinion”, which is a matter of choice. If some don’t agree with my choice, that is their opinion, but this does not necessarily make them “right”.

It is a very simple matter, though it takes some space to thoroughly explain. First, hyphenated “A-Ware” and unhyphenated “aware” are not to be confused with one another. One meaning of hyphenated “A-Ware” can be the same as meanings for “aware”, as in the context, “She was aware of his presence”. But the two sections of the hyphenated “A-Ware” have further meanings.

Sighted persons too easily look at the two words, “Aware” and “AWare”, and their brain “sees” the same thing despite the “W” being uppercase in the second example. It is the same phenomenon as when a word is missing one or perhaps two letters, or two letters are swapped, yet the sighted reader simply doesn’t “see” this. The sighted person’s brain glosses over the mistake and the person perceives the correct word. But blind or visually impaired persons listening to a screen reader’s synthesized speech pronunciation often catch the mistake because the word comes out sounding “mangled”.

Here are a couple of examples. On each line is a word as written, followed by a comma and space, followed by a hyphenated phonetic syllable pronunciation of approximately how it sounds through most speech synthesizers:

Year, yere, rhyming with English “here”
Yaer, yah-uhr
Senior, seen-yuhr
Senoir, sehn-wahr
Senor, sehn-yore

So, if a writer meant to write something about “senior citizens” or “senior high school students”, but mistakenly left out the “I” as in the last example in the above list of words, a screen reader user would quite suddenly be hearing of something which seemed to be speaking of Hispanic male “citizens” or “high school students”. Whereas, if the writer would simply take the time to “listen” to their article before committing their work to publishing, they might catch such glaring mistakes, although a spell check would also help in some cases.

More difficult for a spell or even grammar check to catch are sound-alike words like “loan” (financial product) and “lone” (solitary, isolated), or words with two swapped letters which nevertheless form valid words, such as “form” and “from”. But again, listening to text being read can help catch the latter mistake, whereas the former would require more careful inspection. It is more often the former that I am likely to miss prior to publishing. But, as I am self-publishing, I can at least correct such an error at some later time once I’m made aware of it.

But I digress. “AWare”, not hyphenated but with the uppercase W, would be too easily confused with “aware”, all lowercase, but this is not strictly the desired meaning, so I dropped the dash or hyphen in there to create the distinguishment. It is much more difficult for the sighted person’s brain to just completely ignore the presence of the dash or hyphen. Some sighted persons might still do so, but the distinguishment is nevertheless present, so any mistake in perception is on that reader, not on this author.

Distinction in pronunciation is also created. All lowercase “aware”, as in, “She was aware of his presence, has a soft “ah” sound for the first syllable, like the “a” in “father”, followed by the second syllable sound, “wear”, as in, “I should wear a coat since it is very cold”. However, two syllable “A-Ware” is correctly pronounced first syllable, “A”, like the first letter of the English alphabet or the “a” sound in the English word, “day”, second syllable, “wear”, the same as already described. Initially, pronunciation of “A-Ware” can sound stilted, but practice yields a smooth but noticeably distinguishably different word.

There is a bit more to it than this, but I will allow the character of Dr. Anjela Sims to further describe meanings of the “A” and “Ware” during the story. Speaking of “Anjie”, you might want to read this article on character names.

And since Anjie is said to be quite the chef, I trust the discerning among you can appreciate the humor in the title of this article, “A Dash of This and a Hyphen of That”. Bad joke or pun, depending on how one wants to take it, but ah well. It perhaps piqued your interest enough to read this article and learn something of the reasoning behind the use of a normally frowned upon dash or hyphen in a book title and/or website domain name.

Thanks for reading this notes article, and I hope it was useful in clarifying some aspects of A-Ware series books.