The OED commits hyphen-cide

I’m a big fan of using varied punctuation, so I was dismayed when I first read the headline of a Reuters piece titled “Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on.” I thought public pressure was being brought to bear upon the much-maligned hyphen. According to the piece, roughly 16,000 words from the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (OED) have had their hyphens stripped.

After reviewing a sampling of the list, I feel comforted by the fact that the most frequent use of the hyphen (to avoid ambiguity) has been preserved. I don’t think I’ve ever hyphenated bumble-bee or pot-belly (the first is now spelled “bumblebee”; the second “pot belly”), so these aren’t earth-shattering changes to me. Compound nouns were most impacted by this bout of hyphen removal.

I did find the reasons provided for eliminating the hyphen less than compelling, as they amounted to: 1) people don’t know how to use them; and 2) they don’t look pretty in ads. Ironically, the quote from the editor of the Shorter OED explaining this second factor used two (properly) hyphenated words, “design-led” and “old-fashioned.”

As long as they don’t mess with my emdash, I’ll be fine.