![]() They’re records of how the language changes, and in the old days, before the Shorter Oxford got into the sundering business, they indicated a sort of halfway point, a way station in the progress of a new usage. This is why designers hate to see hyphens flecking the page, and indeed they are antique, unnecessary marks in many instances.īut that’s also part of their appeal. They sprinkle his own text like dandruff and, along with his fetish for the ampersand, give it a musty, old-fashioned look. The issue of proper hyphenation has always been vexing for the Brits, far more than it is for us, and occasioned perhaps the single crankiest article in Fowler’s “Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” first published in 1926.įowler was in favor of hyphens. That “ice cream” and “bumblebee” ever had hyphens to begin with suggests an excess of fussiness on the part of older lexicographers, and may explain some of Mr. Some, like “ice cream,” “fig leaf,” “hobby horse” and “water bed,” have been fractured into two words, while many others, like “ bumblebee,” “crybaby” and “pigeonhole,” have been squeezed into one. What’s getting the heave are most hyphens linking the halves of a compound noun. The ones in certain compounds remain (“well-being,” for example), as do those indicating a word break at the right-hand margin - the use for which this versatile little punctuation mark, a variation on the slash, the all-purpose medieval punctuation, was invented in the first place. The dictionary is not dropping all hyphens. “They’re not really sure what they’re for.” “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. ![]() ![]() THE Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. ![]()
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