regarding-my-use-of-hyphens

Reading over the last post, I find it troubling how much my casual writing style has come to depend on the long hyphenated phrase. I suppose I use this because I'm conscious of how lame it would be if I was using scarequotes any more than I already do. When I put down my thoughts on something, I'm surprised at the extent to which those thoughts turn on long strings of words that I feel I have to evince some personal distance from and some increased sense of these-words-go-together than what I get just by putting the words all in a row.