There’s A Fine Line Between Hyphenated Words

It was brought to my attention in class today that I love the hyphen. Here is an image if you are unfamiliar:

Besides looking like Hitler’s moustache, the hyphen is an amazing thing; it is used to join words or separate syllables of a single word. It has the ability to combine two ordinarily separate words into a new single word with a different meaning. If that’s not mind-blowing, I don’t know what is. Here’s a great example from Wikipedia:

a man-eating shark is a shark that eats humans
a man eating shark is a man who is eating shark meat

And that my friends is what I like to call  “punctuation porn.”