Hyphen use and other sex tips

As you probably know, MC Grammar is as much into physical love as he is into lingual love.

And when it comes to the world of punctuation, there's no sign that imitates the act of physical love more than the hyphen, which helps bring words together as close as they can be, whilst still retaining their individuality.

Hyphens are used to combine words. They are used for:

• prefixes, such as 'pre' (e.g. pre-paid)
• doubled-up vowels, (e.g. de-emphasised)
• clarifying meaning (e.g. to distinguish them from established words, such as post-war)

The general rule is that you should only use hyphens in the case where there may be more than one way that your sentence could be interpreted. For example, in the sentence

I was laid off

You don't need to bother using a hyphen, because there's no other way that 'laid off' could be interpreted. But you might think about using a hyphen in this sentence:

When I got laid off my face had an outbreak of acne

Here, 'laid off' could mixed up with the term 'off my face' so to make it clear what part of the sentence 'off' belongs to, and things get confusing, so it would help to use a hyphen and say 'laid-off' instead.

When I got laid-off my face had an outbreak of acne

If you're confused about where the hyphen is on your computer, it is on the bottom row here. Try it out for maximum hyphen fun!

Prefixes: the fuel belt of your words

Recently, MC Grammar agreed to participate in a 10 kilometre marathon.

There's nothing I enjoy more than a marathon. The way your heart skips and pulses, the way the fresh air rushes through your lungs, the way your parachute pants flap in the wind; but I also respect the harsh deal that nature strikes with us pathetic, fallible humans and our constant need for water, so I never attempt a marathon without the use of my handy fuel belt.

As you can see, the fuel belt provides me with two water bottles at the front, so I can have a quick burst of water whenever I'm trying to break through the pain barrier.

And just like my fuel belt, a prefix is something that attached to the front of another word to add something to it.

A prefix is attached to the start of a word, and partly indicates its meaning. Common prefixes include anti- (against), co- (with), mis- (wrong, bad), and trans- (across).

Most prefixes are generally connected to the rest of the word, such as mistake, transvestite and disbelief. However, you need to use a hyphen between the prefix and the rest of the word in these situations:

• the rest of the word attached begins with a capital letter, as with anti-Stalin, or

• the same vowel as the prefix ends in, as with: anti-inflationary, de-escalate, micro-organism.

So as you can see, prefixes are the fuel you need to refine or change a word.

MC Grammar out!

First Blood: Words on the brink of extinction

BREAKING GRAMMAR NEWS: Reading University (UK) researchers revealed that they have identified the oldest English words, which are tens of thousands of years old.

To do this, they had to what always has to be done in situations such as these: they built a super computer.

Most of the languages from Europe to Asia fall under the category of Indo-European languages, and the vocal sounds they use to express a certain concept are very similar. This means that when new words arise, you can spot them because they don't sound similar. So using their super computer, the boffins at Reading University could work out the age of a word.

'You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future,' Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading told BBC News.

'From that list you can derive a phrasebook of words you could use if you tried to show up and talk to, for example, William the Conqueror.'

The words they found that had been around for the longest were  I, we, two and three. MC Grammar can't be sure why two and three were so popular back then – maybe things only came in sets of two and three – we will never know.

They could also predict what words will be going out of style very soon. They were squeeze, guts, stick and bad as probable first casualties.

'We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve,and we can estimate the rates at which these things are replaced through time'.

And now, to tip our grammar hats to these dying words, we can do no better than to celebrate one of them by looking back at the glorious hey day of the word bad, with a cameo by Michael Jackson.