Text wrap occurs when you call any of the following:

nlFlow – to wrap paragraph text
nltSpread – to place text into table cells

... and also when table headings are fitted into given column widths.

By default, NewLeaf uses the tilde character ‘~’ as an optional word-break point, so that a table heading such as ‘Con~trib~ution’ may appear as:

Con-
tribution

or as

Contrib-
ution

or as

Contribution

... depending on the available column widths. If you require the ‘~’ character as normal text, you could do your own wrapping and use nlPlace (which ignores it) or you could switch to a different soft hyphen with:

nlSoftHyphen 'Ž'