You know what I’ve been seeing a lot of recently? Hyphenated compounds with -ly adverbs. (Yeah, I know, probably not your first guess.) As in, “a fully-developed plan” or “their formerly-intractable armies.” I’m right in thinking this is wrong…um, right? I don’t have a lot of grammatical pet peeves — spelling “ridiculous” with an -e is usually one of them; so is that old Harry Potter staple “He said darkly” — but this has actually been bugging me lately.
I think it’s more because it’s briefly cast doubt on what I thought I knew about grammar, and less because it’s a particularly important or vital rule. I am, in fact, having a tough time — and so would welcome any examples you might have in the comments below — of specific cases where the meaning of a phrase would be different (and thereby rendered confusing) with the hypen than without. I mean, that’s ultimately the purpose of grammar: not to force us all to speak and write the same way, but to alleviate the confusion that often arises when we don’t.