Hyphens, En Dashes, Em Dashes
Q. Now here’s one phrase I’ve always found difficult to hyphenate. “Foreign policy making elite,” referring to an elite making foreign policy. Would Chicago write “foreign policymaking elite”?
A. When it is a matter of joining a compound modifier to other modifiers, all of which precede and modify the same word, hyphens should be employed across the board. So, write “foreign-policy-making elite.” When stacking together such modifiers, hyphenation must eliminate ambiguity. The phrase “foreign policymaking elite” (and Webster’s does not recognize “policymaking,” though American Heritage does), could be misconstrued as a policy-making elite that’s foreign. They make foreign policy, and all of those concepts are being bundled together to modify the elite. This can be done only with hyphens. I don’t think we have a hard and fast rule for this. But one of our exceptions to the rule that prefixes form one word is illuminating. The exception is toward the end of the hyphenation guide in the fifteenth edition of CMOS:
Compounds formed with prefixes are normally closed, whether they are nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. A hyphen should appear, however, . . . before a compound term, such as non-self-sustaining.
Normally it would be “nonsustaining” or “nonself” because the prefix non- tends to form one word with those to which it adheres. But when it is necessary to tack on another word, hyphens are necessary to make the three elements equal in their role as modifiers. See the section titled “Compounds and Hyphenation,” beginning at paragraph 7.82 of the fifteenth edition of CMOS, for a full discussion of compound terms and many examples.
