An over-the-top, gauntlets-thrown, when-is-it-appropriate-to-hyphenate debate

Question

An eye-glazingly, mind-numbingly boring debate is raging on usmessageboard.com over hyphenation. One user posted

full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press

to which another user responded

Has any other POTUS " out-of-the-gate" [sic] preceded and commenced their presidency

which the first user took as an attack on his grammar, and, well, the to-hyphenate-or-not-to-hyphenate debate has raged ever since.

In an attempt to restore the tranquility of the board and its usual civil tone, I offered to submit an appeal for arbitration here.

The question mentioned of which mine may be a duplicate does indeed answer many of the points raised in the battle raging elsewhere, but doesn't address others, which I will try to list below. Nor does it cover the [sic] aspect of our controversy. I realize the question could be split into two separate questions, but that would reduce the chance our community would receive the fairest possible judgment from our community.

And that brings up the objection below to the appeal for arbitration. I imagine there are any number of reasons someone might post a question here. Some, I suppose, are composing an email at work their boss will see, and they want to be as precise as possible so that they make a good impression. Others may be working on a thesis they are going to present and want to be sure of their lingual footing during the orals. Another might be composing a letter to a cheating lover and she wants to express her broken heart in a crystal clear voice free of any quaver an ungrammatical sentence would give it. We neither ask them the reason, nor sanction them if they offer the reason.

I offered the reason because I thought it was a light-hearted and inoffensive addition to my question without detracting from it.

The aspects of this question that weren't addressed in the other's answer, thorough as it was:

1. Since hyphenation is to be used to form a compound word immediately preceding a noun, out-of-the-gate should not have been hyphenated because of the interposition of the word "naked" between the adjectival phrase and the modified noun, "attempt". The OP responded that the stack of adjectives all qualified as immediately preceding the noun;
2. The temporal quality of "out of the gate" made it adverbial and thus undeserving of a hyphen. In response, the OP maintained "out-of-the-gate" was indeed adjectival;
3. The [sic] was not a criticism of the OP's grammar, but a defense against the possibility the OP's mistake would be imputed to the respondent.

So there you have it. Was this a mistake?

full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press

Answer 1

He gave a full throttle performance.

Did he give a full performance of a throttle; or did he give a performance that was full throttle?

He gave a full-throttle performance

Now it's clear which one is meant.

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Especially on this site, you often see [block parentheses] to denote how a sentence should be parsed. E.g.

He gave a [full throttle] performance.

However, these parentheses are only accepted when analyzing the sentence structure, not in normal communication.

This phenomenon of hyphenation-for-clarity does seem to be accepted in normal communication; and its intention is the same: to assist the reader with correctly parsing the sentence.

Logically speaking, they are therefore only really necessary in cases where there is ambiguity. If there is no ambiguity, they are not necessary (from a functional perspective at least. From a grammatical perspective, they may always be required so that the usage remains consistent).

Answer 2

FWIW, I am the person who wrote the sentence containing the "[sic]." CWill accurately expressed my reason for doing so.

The complete sentence CWill wrote is: "There has never been a full-throttle, out-of-the-gate, naked attempt by the press to bring down a president like we are witnessing here."

In my response to him, among other things, I wrote: "Has any other POTUS 'out-of-the-gate' [sic] preceded and commenced their presidency with the nature and extent of utter BS Trump has?"

I included "[sic]" because of the following:

• "Out of the box" is an accepted idiom that is classified as an adverbial prepositional phrase; thus it does not need hyphenation.
• To give "out of of the box" the linguistic function of an adjectival prepositional phrase in a sentence, one must hyphenate it; however, in doing so, one also must place it immediately before the noun/pronoun it modifies. The reason one must so place the adjectival variant of the phrase derives from adverbs being appropriately placed either before and after the words they modify, whereas adjectives customarily, though not universally, precede the words they modify. As far as I know, one should adhere to same sequencing convention for adjectival and adverbial phrases as that of simple adjectives and adverbs. Similarly, readers are expected to use the same convention for comprehending what they read.

The fact that I included "[sic]" is what bothered CWill. The discussion about idioms, adjectival and adverbial phrases, along with my not wanting readers to construe that I'd hyphenated "out of the box," is what I shared with CWill as my reasons for writing "[sic]."

The specific question of grammar/spelling is whether hyphenating "out of the box" in CWill's original sentence is correct. Obviously, insofar as I used "sic" when I quoted his phrase, I think it is not.