Please take a look at the following sentence from this article:
Maybe the usage is colloquial, slang, technical, inaccurate, euphemistic, misleading or inappropriate, and the writer wants to distance him- or herself from it, or to suggest irony, scepticism, distaste or outright derision:
I would like to ask you two questions:
What is the purpose of the hanging hyphen right after him?
Why wasn't used himself?
As written, I could read that part as if the writer wanted to distance somebody else from it, not himself.
Please let me know your thoughts on this.