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Dash off and away

By Will last year, at the end of September Leave a comment on this post

It has been a disastrous day for the hyphen. Nearly 16,000 of them have been cast into oblivion by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, according to the BBC.

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.

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3 Responses to “Dash off and away”

  • Fiona wrote:
    September 24th, 2007 at 1.58 am

    The English language is a de-scriptive, not a pre-scriptive, language. I shall continue to put hyphens where I want to. As Humpty-Dumpty said to Alice, “when I use a word, it means what I want it to mean.”

    Likewise hyphens.

  • Marcus wrote:
    September 25th, 2007 at 7.19 am

    I’m with you Fiona. Why is it “cooperate” instead of “co-operate?” Do people have so little time on their hands that the extra time required to put a - in a word would deprive them of so much? The only thing that’s worse is people saying “thankyou.” I wonder how long it’ll take before Oxford puts that in.

  • Rob Steen wrote:
    October 13th, 2007 at 9.08 am

    Will,

    Just spent an enjoyable half-hour perusing your estimable blog and was most impressed to see you mourning the almost dodo-esque hyphen. I spend half my life telling students how to use it properly. I even told my mate Dave Marsh, when he took over the reader’s editorship at the Grauniad, that he should tackle the paper’s erratic use of same. If there’s one thing that gets my goat even more than critics of Murali’s action, it is a hyphen scorned.

    Bestest

    Rob


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