Spelling police, listen up! Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

[babylonsister]

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
Fri Sep 21, 2007 4:54pm EDT

By Simon Rabinovitch


LONDON (Reuters) - 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.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

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.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

more, plus some examples below:

http://www.reuters.com/article/email/idUSHAR15384620070921?sp=true

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf

hobby horse

ice cream

pin money

pot belly

test tube

water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee

chickpea

crybaby

leapfrog

logjam

lowlife

pigeonhole

touchline

waterborne

© Reuters2007All rights reserved

[Mythsaje]

1. boy, are those divisions arbitrary or what?

Why not put them ALL together as one word rather than splitting some of them?

Works for me.

[babylonsister]

2. And some of those words I've never hyphenated.

But I 'never' use the Oxford Dictionary! ;-)

[angstlessk]

3. Well, I have heard rumors that chat room affectionadoes who find time to have sex yell

OMG! OMG! at peak times during the act???

[Bucky]

10. Yes, but what you don't know is...

that they pronounce "OMG" as a one-syllable, I mean "onesyllable" word.

OMG (ahmj) - exclamation of surprise, derivative of OMFG

[RufusTFirefly]

4. Ah yes. The difference between English in the U.S. and U.K.

You can blame "the Internets" if you'd like but given that many of the words that have recently lost their hyphens in the U.K. have done without them for quite some time in the U.S., could it be that in addition to becoming a client state for the U.S. (thanks to Tony the Poodle) in international conflicts, the U.K. has turned over its dictionary to Americans as well?

Actually, I'm more worried by the disappearance of certain prepositions.

Whereas I used to "mull over" something, I'm now told that I merely "mull" it.
And when I join together with others, I no longer "team up" and instead simply "team."

Personally, that makes me feel like a holiday beverage in the former and a draft horse in the latter, but I guess you just can't fight American cultural imperialism.

How soon until the word officially becomes "nuculer," I wonder?

[porphyrian]

5. You can take my hyphens from my cold, dead hands! - n/t

[Solly Mack]

6. Save the hyphen!

[pacalo]

7. I've never hypenated any of those words, & I'm a frequent user of hyphens.

[Bucky]

8. I'm no Johnnycomelately to grammar, but isn't this a wellknown trend?

Hate to admit it, but the evolution of English grammar gives me a hardon.

[Cruzan]

9. I don't think I've ever in my life seen 'ice cream' hyphenated

Must be a British thing.

[Igel]

13. The style I usually use

would say, "Hey, I want some ice cream!"

"Oh, yeah? We have 23 kinds. What ice-cream flavor do you want?"

"Just chocolate. In a Pepsi-and-ice-cream float?"

Same for lots of things. Take the noun phrase and use it as an adjective (or a free-standing part of a compound) and it gets a hyphen. I think of it as my hyphenated-word convention.

[babylonsister]

16. I believe hyphens are used when words are used as adjectives.

I worked for a newspaper years ago, and that was the rule-of-thumb (to hyphen or not to hyphen?:dilemma: ) at the time.

[Miss Chybil]

11. This was written in London.

It looks like they may be succumbing to American English more than anything else.

[ThomWV]

12. When referring to the President: "Shit-Ball" and Ass-Wipe" work well

[Cha]

14. So does bushit without

the hyphen..kinda morphed together cause they're indistinguishable.

[Ezlivin]

15. Yeah, and if I were king and could kill the apostrophe

...when it's used in "it's" and it's not a contraction. I see that crap all the time. "He put the item in it's place," is an example of misuse.

That and our fascist government has my knickers in a bunch. And I don't even wear knickers.