"Carelessness, or perhaps a laudable desire to economize in hyphens, sometimes leads to the omission of one where it is manifestly a case of all or none. ... Some pretty problems in hyphening are set by the unpleasant modern habit of forgetting the existence of prepositions and using a long string of words as a sort of adjectival sea serpent... Those who like writing in this way can be left to solve their problems for themselves. Indeed, many of our difficulties with hyphens are of our own making; we can avoid them by remembering prepositions ..."

H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage, 2d ed., Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 257.