Who let the peeves out?

"I usually keep my pet peeves locked in a cage," I told my creative nonfiction class, "but every once in a while I have to let them out so they can run around the room yapping and chewing on your ankles."

"So you're saying your pet peeves are chihuahuas?" said one student.

"More like wolverines," I said, but another student pointed out that the wolverine is essentially a cross between a chihuahua and a piranha.

While they were debating, though, I opened the cage and let the chihuahua/piranha/wolverines ramble and scramble around the class, nipping ankles and yapping about weird things that happen to ordinary words and phrases used as adjectives.

One peeve was all worked up about the difference between "everyday" and "every day":

I pet these peeves every day.
These are my everyday peeves.

" 'Every day' tells when," explained a student, "but 'everyday' is more like an adjective."

"That's because 'everyday' IS an adjective," I pointed out. In the English language, words used as adjectives tend to cling together for dear life, as if to protect their precious nouns against an onslaught of wolverines. The same thing happens with hyphens:

That peeve is twelve years old.
He is a twelve-year-old peeve.

See how the hyphens glue the words together to form an adjective? You, too, can use hyphens to form free-range, strangers-on-a-train, never-before-combined words into fresh-from-the-factory-floor adjectives, as long as you let the hyphens fence in the nouns to protect them from the wolverines.

But who will protect our ankles from the pet peeves roaming the room? It's not so easy to persuade a pet peeve back into its cage after it has tasted ankles.