Hyphen

The hyphen, which may not technically qualify as a punctuation mark, because it operates at the level of the word rather than the sentence-it doesn't make you pause (though it may give you pause)-has inspired not one great book but two: "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)," a classic by Edward N. Teall, published in 1937, and "Hyphen," by Pardis Mahdavi, which came out in 2021. Mahdavi, an Iranian-American (hyphen hers), was a dean at Arizona State University when she tackled this project, as part of a series for Bloomsbury Academic called Object Lessons, "about the hidden lives of ordinary things." Mary Norris The New Yorker