Vanishing hyphens
With the appearance of the 6th edition of the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
-- see
the
statement by editor Angus Stevenson on 9/13/07 -- the media have
been abuzz (not a-buzz) about the disappearance of about 16,000 hyphens
in this dictionary. This many words that were hyphenated in the
previous edition are written either solid (
bumblebee,
chickpea) or separated/split (
fig leaf,
pot belly) in this one.
Reactions are, predictably, all over the map: it's about time, ho-hum,
the language is going to hell. The last response seems to have
been prompted mostly by OUP's statement that the elimination of hyphens
was in part motivated by the practices of e-mailing (that's my usage,
and I'm sticking to it) and text messaging, forms of communication
widely seen as contributing to the decline of the language.
A few framings of the story in the media:
Small object of grammatical desire (
BBC News,
9/20/07)
Hyphens are vanishing. Blame e-mail. Sorry, Email. (
Wall
Street Journal Online, 9/20/07)
Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on (
Reuters,
9/21/07)
Hyphen falls victim to the email society (
Telegraph,
9/21/07)
and in discussion forums:
Every so often I get e-mail from Language Log readers who want to know
what the "right" punctuation (solid, hyphenated, separated) of specific
compound words is. I'm not able to give useful advice on these
matters. I know what my own preferences are -- I'm generally
sparing with hyphens, but find that they sometimes work for clarity --
and I know that my practice is sometimes inconsistent, a fact that
doesn't particularly bother me. As
I
pointed out here a while back, not all inconsistency is worth
worrying about -- especially when the conflicting styles of different
writers and manuals accustom readers to more than one variant, as is
surely the case with the three schemes of punctuation at issue
here. So I'm of the ho-hum school.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 22, 2007 12:09 PM