About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.
“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
Lots of examples in the article. But, the problems still aren’t all resolved.
“There are places where a hyphen is necessary,” Stevenson said. “Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity.”
Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
I’m guilty.
what’s a hyphen?
I want to know what the future holds for the hyphen’s sadly neglected grammatical brethren, the en dash and the em dash.
Next will fall the dreaded apostrophe.
In the new utopia, there will be no apostrophe.
This has become an Oxford-controlled-mother-grammar-ef’in’-nanny-state!!
No wonder they are decreasing, you can break your hyphen by not riding side-saddle on a horse or a bike. And no-one rides side-saddle anymore. I learned that in my abstinence class.
This is only the beginning. I just got a sneak peek at next year’s edition, tentatively titled “OxEngDic.”
#6, Alan,
I’m with ya on that one sis.
#7, Gary,
OMG, ya think so?
Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
If it was one of my parties, one and the same…;)
don’t worry about the apostrophe, #4, it’s actually not going to fall, however, there’s a secret plot amongst the linguistically challenged in Germany to abduct the thing. There have been so called “idiot’s apostrophs” cropping up everywhere in the German language. Sometimes, it seems the Apostrophists want an apostrophe to be written before every single “s” in the country. So if they vanish from English, it might be because they find much more use in German, where they’ve been almost out of a job for centuries.
pj
death to the apostrophe to hell with uppercase end oppressive punctuation now
Hey, I learned something to-day!
“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for”
So why not teach them instead of taking the lazy way out?