Stan CareyPeople will be wondering how to use hyphens till the coworkers come home
Twobiscuits🚴‍♂️ 
@stancarey Pal, if you ork my cow, you're not coming home.
@stancarey I have created a massive set of course notes on all the important aspects of writing in English, especially focusing on coherence, information distribution etc. and the bit my students liked most so far was on hyphenation, which mystifies them (German speakers).
@twobiscuits I'm not surprised. Fowler referred to "chaos" and "humiliation" in their use. An editor of the OUP stylebook once said, "If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad." It's a wild domain.
@stancarey Compared to German it's not all that hard. The key is that word order in English is how we identify the subject and object in a sentence. Anything that messes that up, such as another noun being used as a modifier before a noun that is either the subject or the object, has to be marked so you don't mistake it for its head noun. So we link up the parts of a compound modifier and then announce the word that it’s modifying with a space. If the same phrase is used not as a modifier-before-a-noun, it doesn't need to be hyphenated, eg state-of-the-art technology vs. my laptop is state of the art.
In German, hyphens are used to link up the parts of compound nouns that aren't written joined-up. That's the mistake they make in English. Always writing software-developer, game-engine, tech-stack etc. (my kiddies are studying software development).