My goal today is to be the first person ever to write one newspaper column about BOTH the proper use of hyphens AND the dance phenomenon known as “krumping.” (Please note that “krump” may be spelled with a “c”: viz., “crump.”)

My concern is twofold. (A) Rose-Hulman¹ students often abuse hyphens, more through the sin of omission than through the sin of commission (as the Book of Common Prayer says, “we have sinned… in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone” [italics mine]). (B) There is no campus organization, neither interest group nor club nor faculty or staff group to promote the art of krumping in the Rose community. Krumping, as the ever-helpful² Wikipedia tells me, like “clowning,” involves “rapid rhythmic bobbling and arm-swinging,³ as well as intermittent flexing of the spine and thrusting-out⁴ of the chest.” Go to youtube.com or rent Rize. See what you find.

Bringing krumping to campus would increase our vocabulary as well as our funkiness, both of which could stand a boost. We’d learn verbs like “pop-lock”⁵ and “dime-stop”⁶ and “bucking” and “amping”⁷— and for EEs, “amp” would take on a whole new meaning.

Ideally Rose would support both a Clowning Club and a Crumping Club, and these two could take part in a battle-zone⁸ once or twice a year. We could call it the Rose-Hulman Clown-Crump Battle-Zone.⁹

I have definite ideas about who on this campus might make good Crumpers and who would make good Clowners. However, given that my assistant-to-associate-professor¹⁰ tenure decision is still a couple of years away, it’s best if I don’t name names.

Still, krumping battle-zones make nice fundraisers. We could close off Wabash for the weekend and host a block party to raise money for what I think is a worthy cause: buying hyphens for needy students. I realize that, what with the rising cost of chicken wings and engineering textbooks, many students feel they can’t afford to spend their loan money on punctuation that’s generally perceived as superfluous. But for the low, low price of less than a penny a day, you can provide an engineering student with all the hyphens he or she will ever need.

Here, on the house, are a few hyphens to get you going. Cut and paste! (The first ones are always free.)

1. Rose-Hulman: Two names (personal nouns), one school. Needs a hyphen to keep it together.
2. ever-helpful: Adverb + adjective, functioning as an adjective. Hyphen’s optional here. I think I prefer it without.
3. arm-swinging: Noun + participial noun (a.k.a. “gerund”), functioning as one noun. Mandatory hyphen.
4. thrusting-out: Participle + locative particle (“out” looks like a preposition here, but it’s not), functioning as one gerund. Spend the hyphen!
5. pop-lock: two verbs, spliced together to make a new verb. It will need the hyphen for another ten to two hundred years, until it becomes the compound “poplock.”
6. dime-stop: noun + verb, functioning not as a subject + predicate. No-brainer.
7. —: is not a hyphen but a dash— ‘Nother ball of wax. Just don’t confuse them.
8. battle-zone: noun + noun. See notes 1 and 3. This one won’t take long to become a single word.
9. Rose-Hulman Clown-Crump Battle-Zone: hyper-hyphenation, I know, but it’s necessary.
10. assistant-to-associate-professor: this is overkill, but it’s all functioning as one long adjective modifying the noun “tenure decision.” Trust me, if there’s a noun I want modified correctly, it’s “tenure decision.”