The Hyphen is one of those curious characters left over from ancient systems of writing, something like the ‘Pilcrow’ ( ¶ ) but much more common.
In Greek, it means ‘under one,’ (ὑπό ἕν = hypá³ hén) and was originally much like a simple underline written under two consecutive characters to indicate that they belonged to the same word. This helped to reduce ambiguity in phrases like:
‘WHENIWASACHILDANICEMANLIVEDNEXTDOOR’
By ‘joining’ the N and the I in this way, it was much simpler to distinguish the difference between ‘an iceman’ and ‘a nice man’. Everything else in this little sentence can be figured out with comparatively little effort, so of course they didn’t bother.
If you’ll glance at the blog entry on Paragraphs, you’ll see that spaces between words are a relatively recent invention, because parchment, which was made from real lamb skins, was way too expensive to waste on frivolous things like empty space when any fool could figure out where word boundaries were located for themselves.
Mind you, back in those days, speed-reading hadn’t been invented either, so taking half an hour to figure out what a single page of text meant was a worthwhile investment.
Well, to make a long story short, eventually cheap paper made of plant fibres was invented and the riffraff learned to read, thereby putting a lot of scribes out of business, since the act of writing a simple letter home was no longer a commercial transaction involving a third-party writer on one end and a third-party reader on the other. One still finds them in societies where illiteracy is common, but in most of the ‘Western World’ one needs them almost as rarely as one needs a blacksmith to shoe a horse or a tinker to mend a broken pot.
The appearance of spaces between words left the handy textual metacomment that the hyphen represented available for other purposes, and in fact it was drafted into service for several notions, the most common in handwritten missives being the underline which adds emphasis, usually represented in printed text as italics.
The second use — which also preserves the original meaning of a ‘joining’ between two things — is today’s ordinary hyphen, which we use for many purposes hovering around some sort of linkage, whether explicit or implied.
Roughly the same situation exists for the nobility, except that the usual scheme was for a woman who married a man of lesser social status to retain her higher-status family name as part of a blended name, with the husband adopting the blended name as well. Which name comes first is often a matter of personal preference.
Likewise, some given names are hyphenated, like Jean-Claude Van Damme or Jean-Paul Sartre, so if you’re ever in charge of designing an input field for names, don’t be a boor. Many people use ‘unexpected’ characters in their names, like José Feliciano or Já¼rgen Todenhá¶fer. It’s polite to let people do pretty much what they want to do with their own damned names, to say the least. ASCII character input fields may have made sense in ancient times, let’s say 1991, but ever since Unicode became an international standard, there’s little or no excuse to pretend that every modern computer doesn’t support every character used in every major language in the world.
The wine-dark seas of Homer (attributive) might either be described as wine dark (predicative) or as wine-dark, depending on how the speaker believes the words ought to be spoken and the exact usage of the words involved. Some words are inherently ambiguous without the context supplied by one or more associated words, so a safe cracker isn’t quite the same as a safe-cracker. The first might simply be gluten-free, whilst the second is more probably a felon.
The Associated Press Stylebook is very valuable for newspaper reporters and print publishers, because it pays attention to the requirements of print media, and so values space-saving conventions. The online version is available here by subscription: http://www.apstylebook.com/ or you can purchase the print version through any bookstore.
The Tameri Guide for Writers is available online here: http://www.tameri.com/edit/style.html It tracks the AP Stylebook fairly closely, but has the advantage of being available gratis.
The Modern Language Association Handbook is very popular for scholarly writers in the humanities, especially academic writers. It’s available online here: http://www.mlahandbook.org/ and one ‘purchases’ online access through purchasing a copy of the current printed book, all of which contain access codes.
The Guardian Styleguide is available online here: http://www.theguardian.com/styleguide There’s no charge for online use, although they also sell an updated printed version. It’s nice for UK usage.
The BBC News stylebook from a while back is available as a PDF here: http://www2.media.uoa.gr/lectures/linguistic_archives/academic_papers0506/notes/stylesheets_3.pdf They do have a more recent version available to people in the UK available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/news-style-guide but you’ll be intercepted unless you’re ‘local,’ the theory being that UK citizens have paid their license fees and are thus deserving of BBC largesse. On the other hand, About.com has a freely-available version here: URL Gobbledygook from About.com
In Canada, you might want to take an online look at The Canadian Style: http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/tcdnstyl/index-eng.html?lang=eng
You might also want to take a look at the famous The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
Strunk and White has its detractors, but few writers would ignore the overall thrust of the work. It’s well worth having, even if you use it as a source of arcane ‘rules’ that you’d personally prefer to flout.