When I saw someone write, I will resign my contract because I received a significant salary increase, I knew it was time to discuss the value of knowing the difference between resign and re-sign.
If you resign a contract, you quit it; if you re-sign a contract, you sign it again. Quite a difference.
The presence of a hyphen in re-sign gives us plenty to think about. Hyphens are often used for new words. I am not old enough to remember when today was spelled to-day (no one is), but I am old enough to recall when nondisabled and email used hyphens, as in non-disabled and e-mail. They were fledgling words that didn't sound weird but looked it. Then once a word becomes so commonplace that even our grandfather would know it—and I am a grandfather!—we gladly drop the hyphen in favor of a more fluid spelling. Yet the general rule that we don't need a hyphen after re except when the next letter is an e does not always work. In the case of re-sign, we hyphenate it simply to avoid confusing it with resign, which has quite the opposite meaning.
