This just in, courtesy of our Anglophile-eyed British colleague, program coordinator Jacqueline Davies:
Hypens are history, at least for 16,000 words deemed hyphen unworthy.
Here, word-for-word and hyphen-for-hyphen is a report on this grammatical development from the BBC News Magazine:
Small object of grammatical desire
By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine
It’s small. It’s flat. It’s black. And according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, its numbers are shrinking. Welcome to the world of the hyphen.
Having been around since at least the birth of printing, the hyphen is apparently enjoying a difficult time at the moment.
The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog.
BECOMING TWO WORDS
Fig leaf
Hobby horse
Ice cream
Pin money
Pot belly
Test tube
The blame, as is so often the case, has been put at least in part on electronic communication. In our time-poor lifestyles, dominated by the dashed-off [or should that be dashed off or dashedoff] e-mail, we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.
And English, being a language lacking any kind of governing body and instead relying on studies of usage, is changing to keep up.
Read the rest of the piece , with examples of words stripped of their hyphens, and enlivened by comments. (Check out the full Oxford English Dictionary’s homepage, available online, but at a price beyond most of us.)
So, what does that mean for the future of e-mail/email?
What’s your reaction to the OED’s decision? What words do you think could do without the hyphen?
