today I ran across the word "hyphen" used in a way I had never seen before. I was visiting the Woodstock, VT Historical Society Museum prior to a performance there, and the caption of a picture read something like this:

"the barn and main house were joined by a hyphen in 1943"...

what was meant was a long, low building joining the two previous structures. my OneLook search netted a whole lot of punctuation marks, but no buildings.
what say the board?

A good visual metaphor!

well, that's what I guess was meant. I like it, too, but was wondering if there was more to it.

the caption of a picture read something like this:

"the barn and main house were joined by a hyphen in 1943"...
Was it an aerial photo, by any chance?

aerial

no, just a picture of the house/hyphen/barn. it was a shed-roof sort of structure, with a few windows, that closed up the space between the two other buildings.
the word was used in such a way that it seemed to be a type of structure, rather than a description of it's shape/function.

No luck on finding an old use of the word hyphen, but I did stumble across this:
Linguistics was first used to emphasize the difference between a newer approach to the study of language and the more traditional approach of philology. The philologist was concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as reflected in literary texts. The linguist tends to give priority to spoken languages, analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.
http://www.m-w.com/info/w3/language.htm

Edit-- it was a shed-roof sort of structure, with a few windows, that closed up the space between the two other buildings. [lightbulb]
In other words, it wouldn't be all that functional by itself, but serves to connect two parts, thus making a whole.

serves to connect two parts

By a happy coincidence I came across a parallel example in a book just read, sent to me by a good friend:

She took the lower Severn River Bridge into the city. […] She crossed the bridge over College Creek – just a hyphen between two roads – turned up the road in front of the college…

from Seventeen Against the Dealer by Cynthia Voigt

maverick--this is about the 6th. different thing in the past week that has come up by at least two different people, in my circle of awareness. Three different people suddenly mentioned "To Kill a Mockingbird", for one of them. And now here you are, saying you've just found another ref. to a concrete, hands-on hyphen!

2. transf. a. A short pause between two syllables in speaking.

1868 GEO. ELIOT Sp. Gipsy I. 15 Whistles low notes or seems to thrum his lute As a mere hyphen 'twixt two syllables Of any steadier man. 1872 C. KING Mountain. Sierra Nev. x. 208 With hyphens of silence between each two syllables.

b. A small connecting link.

1868 G. DUFF Pol. Surv. 169 It was a bridge for migrations. It was a hyphen, connecting different races. 1881 Daily Tel. 21 June 6/8 M. de Lesseps, who is the sworn foe of all such geographical hyphens [isthmuses].


...and then there's the verb.

>aerial<

Prolly looked something like this:

............hy-phen

hy-phen
that or some sort of funky chicken:
hyp-hen

tsuwm, that seems to be getting towards the usage. it makes sense, I just had never seen it used thusly. thanks.

Jackie, some sort of harmonic convergence occuring?

hyp-hen

Which is how it divides up etymologically. Good work, cygne.

just fowl-o-wing my instincts...

More like fallow-wing...

> fallow-wing...

so we're neatly back to adjuncts to buildings :)