In 1918 William Strunk and E.B.White wrote the first edition of an American style-guide called 'The Elements of Style. The book concentrated on questions of usage and cultivation of style in good writing.
It included, amongst other areas, 11 rules for punctuation and grammar. It has been updated and re-published many times, the latest being in 2005.
In 1999, a journalist for the Washington Post Bob Hirshfield, who was heartily sick of poor spelling and grammar, wrote an article about a new computer virus called the Strunkenwhite Virus.
This virus was 'more dangerous than the Chernobyl threat'. Apparently the virus refused to deliver emails with grammatical errors. It would apparently shut down the computer that sent the email and take hours to restart. He quoted the FBI who (via the telephone because he was too scared to use his computer email system) stated this insidious virus was 'a threat too freedom and Western Society, blah, blah, blah.'
The article was of course a hoax, but the sales of 'The Elements of Style' increased dramatically at the time.
-----------------The Hyphen------------
The Hyphen is a little discussed punctuation mark that is very useful and requires some discussion even though its usage seems to be declining.
It was invented by Guttenberg when he was devising his movable type. In short, if a word was not completed by the end of a line he included a hyphen to indicate the word was unfinished and cont-
ued on the next line. Clever eh!
Now it is used to change the meaning of a word but needs to be used carefully.
Consider extra-marital sex and extra marital sex.
Or man-eating shark to man eating shark.
Or re-formed rock band to reformed rock band.
It is also nessesary use it to spell out numbers (Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six) and to link proper nouns (Melbourne-Albury train, Frankston-Dandenong Road)
Another use is to avoid 'letter collision.'
Consider shell-like if it was written as shelllike or re-use as reuse.
The Germans could do with a few hyphens in their language.
They seem to take pleasure of taking two or three words and jamming them together.
To us English speakers some words are long and unweildly and we need to look hard at it to decipher and pronounce it.
Volkswagen means peoples wagon or car.
The infamous Kristallnacht means literally the night of broken glass.
Dummkopf means numb head.
Doppelganger is double-goer meaning your exact double.
Schadenfreude means pleasure derived from the pain of others.
Thank Guttenberg for the hyphen, but I wish he could have encouraged his fellow Germans to put it to more use.
.[1] Truss,L. 2009 Eats, Roots and Leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation, Profile, London
