Quote:

Check this page. I refer particularly to this sentence:

Quote:

Worse yet, the thirty-second nature of a small fish's memory guarantees that they can never, ever get used to it.



I submit that the use of the hyphen increases ambiguity rather than decreasing it. A hyphen would normally be used to indicate that this was an ordinal number rather than a measure of time, but the context seems to suggest that it is the measure of time that is meant.



Whoops! Despite possibly being responsible for pointing you to that link initially, I missed that. Now I clearly see the ambiguity you describe. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

noho ora mai
http://maxqnzs.com/References.html