....and of appointing sub-editors with dirty enough minds to catch this sort of thing. From the Pratt Tribune in Kansas this Saturday.
After seeing common American English skills, I'd wager even money that a hyphen would make the situation worse.
Yes, the location of the hyphen would certainly be crucial in this situation. You definitely want it nestled close to the hand, but for the best results, you have to make sure that the contact with the hand is exactly right. Trying to put it on the wrong side of the hand just isn't going to work.
If you are looking to raise eyebrows in the U.S., and care only about quantity, then I don't believe it matters which side it goes on. OTOH, if you care about quality of eyebrows, your prejudicial profiling likely will be a reasonable guide. 'Furriners' speaking something more closely resembling the Queen's English ought to be able to find good quantities of humorous fodder originating in the U.S.
"-hand" and "hand-" in this context would really give the reader two fundamentally different meanings for the headline. Even in Murican. We have the Queen's English; you have your Head Of State's English.... But yes, you're right. The British will, for example, never stop laughing at "fanny pack". Or "spunky".
Fixed it for you. Don't underestimate 'murican academic ignorance. I very much hope we don't let it continue dropping to that level.
Hyphens? We can't even agree on where the 'u' goes, or accept a logical date format. I fear the intelligence; she has been piqued.
Especially not when the people crafting the spell checkers can't write their way out of a paper bag, and not when their bosses insist that the oddly-named 'US English' is inexplicably the de facto 'international standard'. Needless to say, I have to turn the infuriating spell checkers off. On everything.
I get the gears here, every time I type colour, or centre, for example. Good luck to brits typing tyre (hah, see: it auto corrected to "tire") ...
BTW, when I first glance at this thread I read it as.... .. the importance of hymens, so I don't know where my brain has been lurking since I got back from the dentist's.
Don't be so hard on yourselves. I mean, yes, as @hyo silver helpfully points out, with useful backing from @Mendel Leisk and @RCO, your rules are consistently wrong (or do Americans spell it "rong"? I know you have an aversion to complex spellings). But you're no worse at following your rules than the rest of us. A few years ago, I had to recruit students from countries across the Asia-Pacific region to do some part-time work for a project we were working on. I've had to do the same for other projects in Europe and America too. The standard of English in the applications from English-speaking countries was dire. I'd actually specified that you had to have excellent grammar and spelling - and attention to detail - in order to do the job, so the kids were all aware of this. I'd advertised in the best universities in each country, so I was supposedly advertising to the elite. And yet, almost every application from a native speaker was semi-literate. One had worked in a well-known Australian coffee-shop chain, and included this in both his cover letter and his CV. He spelled the name of the coffee-shop chain three different ways. Among the others, hardly any could punctuate, or complete a coherent sentence. In Australia, I ended up taking on an Indonesian kid, because his English was better than that of his Australian classmates. The two universities whose students consistently sent in applications in properly-spelled, properly-punctuated, grammatical English were National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University (also in Singapore). Universiti Sains Malaysia was good too. So it's not just America. The English in Britain, Australia and New Zealand is consistently appalling as well.
Yeah, I don't know how he does that. It's not fair. I always avoid conversations about Southern Lebanese ports on this forum.
