Hi, Katie.
I'm not sure your example is a good one. It looks as
if waterfall is hyphenated because the word waterfall
came at the end of the sentence. the blue-water would
mean that the water in the fall is blue.
Depending on when and where a book was written, some
words that we today do not hyphenate, like "today"
were hyphenated--"to-day." When I come across a book
like that I put that comment in the long synopsis--I
do the same when the words are spelled the English way
rather than the American way, e.g. when words that in
American end in o r end in o u r , like the word
honor. In a book that Mickey is currently validating
(I'm helping supply some pages), sometimes the
American spelling is used and sometimes the English;
it isn't consistent. I think she'll put that
explanation in.
But back to you hyphen question: when one adjective is
created from two or more adjectives, or from an
adjective and a noun, a hyphen is used to indicate
that it is one word. For example, a red-eyed bull; a
twenty-four-year-old girl. In some cases not
hyphenating can lead to a different
meaning--unfortunately not in the examples I gave.
Here's a quote from the seciton on hyphens in the book
Eats, Shoots and Leaves, an amusing book about grammar
that is in the bookshare collection: "if it's not
extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps
extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of
coconuts." Another example she gives is "the
pickled-herring merchant," who "can hold his head
high," but a pickled herring merchant might be
arrested for intoxication, smile
hth
Cindy
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