1982 [the first recorded instance of the digital emoticon]

it’s generally a safe bet to hyphenate the following: •Compound modifiers consisting of two or more adjectives that precede a noun and act as a single idea, like silly-looking monster (to differentiate from a jovial monster whose primary responsibility is to look).

•When a proper noun is already plural, the usual rule for possessives applies: The Smiths’, Rolling Stones’, the United States’ policies

A collective noun, to be clear, is a noun that refers to something comprising a number of people or things—like the words family, group, duo, and team. Typically the verb that follows can be either singular or plural in form, depending on whether the individuals who make up the collective noun are acting together or separately.

Jane Straus’s Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation

The bigger-picture creation (the “mother,” if you will) takes italics, while the components within it (the “baby” creations) take quotation marks. You’d put book titles in italics but chapter names in quotes;

•Words that end in -es and are spelled the same as both the singular and plural form take only an apostrophe for the possessive of both forms (series’, species’

“‘Cis-’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘on the same side as,’ and is therefore an antonym of ‘trans-.’

One example of a word that would perhaps be best left with a space is pit bull, to differentiate from Pitbull,