Hyphenation information, Part 2

Some people are confused on when to hyphenate verbs. I think this is a little more of a grey area because the rules are not as clear on it. And generally people understand the phrase with or without the hyphen. But, I think in some cases, hyphenating a verb that has a modifier is appropriate. Examples that come to mind would be:

"Voice-activate your smartphone" vs. "voice activate your smartphone." While either one is acceptable, the "voice-activate" is clearer. Here, the modifying word "voice" is a noun, so it should be attached to the verb to make the entire phrase a verb.

"You should slow-drive your car in the police chase" vs. "You should slow drive your car in the police chase." Here the hyphen is needed, because "drive" is the verb, and "slow" modifies it, but without the hyphen, the context of this being a "slow-drive" is less clear. While this sentence may be awkward to start with, it is grammatically correct to use "slow-drive" as the verb. In this case, "slow" is an adverb, so the sentence could also be written "You should drive slow in the police chase."

If the modifying word the verb is a noun, you have almost no choice but to attach the noun to the verb with a hyphen, so that entire word becomes a verb. Other examples would be:

To Self-perpetuate
To Self-administer
To Hand-carry
To Table-hop
To Carpet-crawl
To Hand-write
etc.

Please give me some additional examples of noun-modified verbs that need to be hyphenated. Are there any that don't need to be hyphenated?


Another area of mistakes in hyphenation is with adverbs that end in -ly. When words end in -ly, and are used as an adverb, they should NOT be hyphenated. An example would be thus:

"The slow-moving car" compared to "the slowly moving car." Don't hyphenate the "slowly moving" phrase, because the -ly extension essentially IS the hyphen. If you did hyphenate it, it would be "the slowly-moving car" and that would not been correct.