The problem is that you have punctuation indexed as a separate word, so jerry-smith looks like three words in the index, instead of the single term you are looking for. Instead of \punct{1,5} you probably want [\alnum\punct]{1,99}, or [\alnum\-]{1,99}.
What if we take hyphen out of the langc? That seems to fix it also.
or, to summarize, what is the sure way to search for literal hyphens between terms and the end of terms, for example,
searching for
If you take the hyphen out of langc then the presence of the hyphen disables any language processing, and it is treated as a literal substring search.
Changing the index expression to include the hyphen would improve the performance of the search with either langc setting as it could find the term directly in the index.
that is why we did just \punct{1,5}, which fixed this problem.
Looks like, if you have one you cannot have the other.
just punctuations solves the above problem, but breaks jerry-smith search.
alnum & puntuations breaks the above problem, but solves the jerry-smith search.
You may need to be more selective about which puctuation you want to include in the index expression, and which you want to consider as part of a term you want to search for. You can have several index expressions, e.g.