Some people have origin stories. Pardis Mahdavi has a hyphenation story. Her Iranian family was the target of a hate crime in Minnesota. She was stripped of her citizenship in Iran. Eventually, she embraced the hyphen between the words Iranian and American as her identity. But what, she wondered, is the function of a hyphen? Does it unite two ideas, or divide them? From its beginnings in ancient Rome, Mahdavi found that we have constantly argued over the meaning and function of the hyphen.