In today's Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith comments on a difficult punctuation mark: Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens. Here's an excerpt:
...this is one element of grammar I don't really consider to be grammar. It's not a question of grammar or even usage, it's a question of the rules created for the sake of consistency by individual organs and publishing houses, and each of these organs has a guide that tells you what to do in each case.
These rules are called, in publishing, strangely, “style,” as opposed to grammar. Different journals or institutions use different style guides, so it is pointless to try to stick to one. There is a person at each institution called a copy editor whose job it is to have this guide by his or her side and to change each writer's texts so that they conform to the rules. So I don't have to worry about them. It's like picking a typeface or a point size. Not my job.
And now I – and you, and all the copy editors – have to worry about these vagaries even less. That's because the new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens.
The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification. They changed most of the hyphenated words – such as leap-frog and ice-cream – by turning them into one word (leapfrog) or two distinct words (ice cream).
There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating. Electronic communication tends to be more streamlined: We use punctuation less, generally, in e-mails and text messages, and in advertising slogans.
Read the whole article, and visit the website of the Oxford English Dictionary. You'll enjoy them both.
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