True Tales of Punctuation Horror
May 8th, 2012
I’m not making this up. I promise.
As any writer or editor worth his or her stylebook understands, the phrase “third party” is sometimes used as a noun and sometimes used as a compound adjective.
Noun: “That website is owned by a third party.”
Compound adjective: “That there is a third-party website.”
About as simple as it gets, right?
With all due respect to my daughter, who is finishing up her first year at Villanova law school: not to lawyers, it’s not.
At least not to the lawyers who reviewed the following text:
You are going to a third–party website that [company redacted] does not control. The website is governed by the third party’s posted privacy policy and terms of use, and the third party is solely responsible for the content, offerings and level of security presented on its website.
The lawyers called for the removal of the hyphen in the first sentence.
The writer responded with this: “We’d prefer to abide by the grammatical rule of using a hyphen when two essentially separate words are modifying a noun.”
The lawyer responded: “No objection to leaving the hyphen, but then add the hyphen to all the ‘third party’ references that did not have the hyphen.”
This is the sort of thing that helps give lawyers a bad name.