I mention this every now and then, so I would have skipped this example, but I thought the article was interesting enough to bear mentioning.
Here’s the rule: When two words modify the same noun together, you hyphenate them, unless the first word is an adverb. It’s called a compound adjective.
The title of the article is “Why You Always Have Room for Pie.” Here’s a missing hyphen:
Imagine if your ancestors binged on buffalo meat and then stumbled across a patch of ripe berries — but everyone was too full to eat them. Skipping dessert in that scenario would mean missing out on a stash of important nutrients.
The mechanism that allows us to make room for dessert is called sensory specific satiety, which means that the body has different limits for different foods as a way to help ensure a balanced intake of nutrients. Barbara Rolls, a professor and the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior at Pennsylvania State University, has been studying sensory specific satiety since the early 1980s.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/well/eat/eating-variety-effect-thanksgiving.html (might have a paywall)
Technically, without the hyphen, the first word by itself modifies the second two. And here, “specific satiety” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Here’s the picture that went with the article:
