Hyphenation

This article may be overly hyphenated. Please inform all editors of this article by leaving crude and hateful messages on their talk pages that they need to come back and clean up the hyphens with more appropriate punctuation such as asterisks and dollar signs and commas, and feel free to add more to make their job harder.

Hyphenation
Also Known as	"Hyphen-ation", "Hifu-nation"
Motto	Never hyphenate a five-letter word un-less you are us-ing 72-point font.
Hyphenation is where the hyphens are on this map. The two hyphens that are crossed-over each-other are mat-ing (that is why they are glow-ing red)-- and if you read the code of hyphenation, you will see they are mating il-legal-ly. The part that looks like the word "start" is actual-ly some very flex-ible con-tortionist hyphens-- they are also out-laws.
The national flag of Hyphenation. Red is the sym-bol of blood (in re-ference to chop-ping), and white is the sym-bol of pur-ity (in re-ference to stay-ing straight).	The national coat-of-arms of Hyphenation. The vert-ical hyphen float-ing above the period is sym-bolic that hyphens should take pride and not lay-around so much. In fact, period-hover-ing is one of the things hyphens look best do-ing.
Official languages	En-dash (you can get a sample of this language here)
Demographic noun	Hyphen, en-dash
Demographic adjective	Hyphenese

Hyphenation, some-times erroneous-ly spelled Hyphen-ation or Hifu-nation, is a country some-where in the far-off land of Grammar.

Indigenous peo-ples

Some hyphens enjoy-ing a dough-nut.

Residents of Hyphenation are known as hyphens or en-dashes. They are typical-ly re-present-ed by a horizo-ntal line hover-ing between blue lines when they travel on notebook pages.

Demo-graphics

You can get a samp-le of the graphics by play-ing the demo a-vailable for free down-load at the o-fficial national web-site of Hyphenation. Un-fortunately, we for-got the URL and the IP-address of their se-rver.

National Law

The national flag being flown-in a small sub-urb in Hyphenation.

There are lots of laws in the country of Hyphenation. The National Board of Hyphen Rule-Makers (consisting of twenty-one hyphens who be-lieve they are quali-fied to dis-cuss law) is a com-mit-tee that stays awake on ev-ery third Satur-day night drink-ing and the next morn-ing with a hang-over. Their other purpose is to meet with one-another dur-ing that hang-over at the Capital-Letter Town-Hall to dis-cuss what sort of laws they can make-up for their nation and when to put them in-to effect.

Most of the laws is-sued in Hyphenation get re-pealed be-fore long, due to the poor law en-forcement that seems to be com-mon through-out the land of Grammar. Law-abid-ing citi-zens and grammar-police are typical-ly shunned by those who do not under-stand the law.

Here one more re-cent version of the Code of Hyphenation:

CODE OF HYPHENATION

I. BEHAV-IOR IN THE PRES-ENCE OF PERIODS

a. When not period-floating as direct-ed in the coat-of-arms, hyphens should both avoid be-ing near periods and al-so remain in a laying-down po-sition.

b. If a period express-es it wishes to be a decimal then the hyphen may a-ccompany it, as long as it lies down next to it (optional-ly with numbers sep-arating them).

II. CODE OF CON-DUCT WHEN CHOP-PING

a. If a word is too fat to fit on one line, then a hyphen is al-lowed to chop the word in half.

b. Five-letter words and words with only one syl-lable are exempt from the treat-ment de-scribed in Section II.a.

1. The number of syl-lables in a word will be de-termined during the case in the court-room by the judge, de-pend-ing on whether he pre-fers British-English, American-English, or ESL-English.

c. Hyphens may chop hyphens, as long as they are re-placed with that double-hyphen char-acter not found in the char-acter set a-vaila-ble to most ty-pists in most count-ries (⸗). This can be ac-complished by tak-ing two hyphens and lay-ing one above-the-other and slant-ing them one di-rection.

This no-tice from the U-H-S could have bene-fit-ed from chop-ping. Un-fort-unate-ly, the U-H-S does not em-ploy hyphens.

III. CODE OF CON-DUCT WHEN JOIN-ING

a. Hyphens may join two or more words to-gether if those words like each other and make sense as a sin-gle word. Only one-of-the words may be male, but a male doesn't have to be pre-sent.

b. If a di-vorce is desired, the hyphen may act as a coun-selor pro-vided he or she does not hurt the feel-ings of the two or more words in-volved.

IV. MAT-ING

a. This section has been re-pealed and has not yet been re-placed with a new law.

b. If a hyphen wish-es to chop a sentence, mating is required.

c. Only two hyphens per set-- We don't sup-port poly-gamy even though we are o-kay with it in words as in-dicat-ed in section III.a.

d. Mating hyphens must get really close to-gether in impor-tant typ-ed do-cuments and in all hand-written do-cuments. Fus-ing should be done end-to-end, not in the mid-dle. Once fus-ed to-gether, call your-self an em-dash.

e. In less impor-tant typ-ed do-cuments such as read-me files, fus-ing is pro-hibited be-cause the fus-ed char-acter is not avai-lable to the ty-pist. In-stead, hyphens should just lie next to one-a-nother.

f. If em-ployed as a math-emati-cian, hyphens may not fuse. Instead, they should lie on top of each other or stay single.

V. COMMON-SENSE

a. No be-ing curv-y or kink-y.

b. Be the same co-lor as the sur-round-ing peo-ple. We are a se-gre-ga-tion-ist nation.

c. Never touch the bot-tom line on the paper un-less you are be-ing de-moted as an under-score.

d. No talk-ing. Ever. You are re-quired to ut-ter your vow-of-silence in your head rath-er than a-loud.

e. Be straight and make sure your orient-ation is cor-rect.

VI. OTHER

a. You are to explicitly ignore section VI.a.

b. All vio-lators of the law are sub-ject to harsh scold-ing and de-hyphen-ation.