Compounding Trouble

I recently got a referral to help a photographer with the table of contents for his new book. I am not an artist, but the client’s questions concerned the photograph’s titles, all of which were compounds. He asked, “How do you know which words are hyphenated, which are not, and which are all one word?”

I wish there was a simple answer to this. In fact, it feels as if I spend half my time reviewing hyphenation in the Chicago Manual of Style and looking words up in Merriam-Webster’s. The rules are complicated, arcane, and sometimes even annoying. In the end, I showed the client what would be correct and to the best of my ability explained why. When I observed that English can be a ridiculously complicated language, he said, ruefully, “I’ve noticed.”