The disappearing hyphen
27/09/07 Filed in: Literature
What's in a hyphen?
16000 words have been de-hyphenated in the latest short edition of the Oxford English dictionary. The cock-a-hoop linguists responsible are praising themselves for a job well done.
The bumble-bee, for instance, has now been condensed into one word, as have icecream and 15998 other compound nouns. However, this clear-out is only short-lived because linguistically value-adding compound nouns will soon appear auto-magically in the place of those that have just been removed.
You see, language is fluid, and all that happens is that a new hyphen will appear to add clarity to a noun. For instance, the humble bee will be better defined and become the brown-and-yellow bumblebee. Simple, see.
Personally, I think it is bad news to mess with the hyphen. This is not because I am against compressing compoundnouns, (the more succinct and clean a language the better) but the galling thing is, the spelling changes have been driven by print designers' dislike of ugly punctuation. How lame.
Can we get our own back and ban any designers who insist on jazzing up text with different colored letters, or can we shoot head-line writers who mis-use capital letters? Just an off-the-wall idea to redress the balance.
What I never worked out, by the way, was why the perennial honey bee has never been separated by a hyphen ever in its existence. How unfair and inconsistent is that?
16000 words have been de-hyphenated in the latest short edition of the Oxford English dictionary. The cock-a-hoop linguists responsible are praising themselves for a job well done.
The bumble-bee, for instance, has now been condensed into one word, as have icecream and 15998 other compound nouns. However, this clear-out is only short-lived because linguistically value-adding compound nouns will soon appear auto-magically in the place of those that have just been removed.
You see, language is fluid, and all that happens is that a new hyphen will appear to add clarity to a noun. For instance, the humble bee will be better defined and become the brown-and-yellow bumblebee. Simple, see.
Personally, I think it is bad news to mess with the hyphen. This is not because I am against compressing compoundnouns, (the more succinct and clean a language the better) but the galling thing is, the spelling changes have been driven by print designers' dislike of ugly punctuation. How lame.
Can we get our own back and ban any designers who insist on jazzing up text with different colored letters, or can we shoot head-line writers who mis-use capital letters? Just an off-the-wall idea to redress the balance.
What I never worked out, by the way, was why the perennial honey bee has never been separated by a hyphen ever in its existence. How unfair and inconsistent is that?
.
... 
.
.
...
.
. 
