| Kommentar | Please see this interesting article about hyphenation in the Toronto Globe and Mail (hope the box will take it):
Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens
RUSSELL SMITH
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
October 11, 2007 at 1:35 AM EDT
In my position of great privilege, hyphens are one thing I never have to worry about. Oh, I have the explanatory pages marked in reference books, and there are many of them. My Editing Canadian English devotes 12 solid pages to compounds and how they are made, to the difference between a hyphen and an n-dash and a solidus (that's what commoners call a forward slash). My Oxford Dictionary for Writers And Editors has a separate entry for each compound, one for crossbill (a passerine bird) and one for cross-bill (a promissory note), one for cross-link (hyphen), crossmatch (one word) and cross section (two words). I don't have to learn all these words and exceptional cases; I don't even have to read them.
Why? Because 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.
Furthermore, as the editor of the dictionary admitted to a Reuters reporter, the world of letters is increasingly ruled by designers. Type looks so much prettier, so much slicker, when it is not prickly with hyphens. It's easier to lay out words in narrow columns, too, when they are easily separable.
Here are some examples of new compounds created by the editors: Pigeon-hole became pigeonhole, water-borne became waterborne and chick-pea became chickpea. And these words, formerly hyphenated, are now split in two: test tube, water bed, hobby horse. In many of these cases, the Oxford was merely catching up with usage: Waterborne, for example, is probably used by the majority of newspapers anyway. (But as if to prove how arbitrary this all is, the old Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors has long given waterbed as one word. Aren't these books published by the same company?)
Of course, the Shorter Oxford retained some hyphenated phrases to avoid ambiguity: They will permit the phrase “twenty-odd,” meaning “approximately twenty,” because to say “twenty odd people” has a somewhat different meaning. Copy editors love to give examples of the ways in which missing hyphens can cause confusion; perhaps the best-known example is “used car salesman,” which can be read in two ways unless you make a hyphenated compound out of “used-car.” The phrase “50 year old kittens” will also need a hyphen somewhere if it is to make any sense.
Okay, so what's the big deal? Will this mass cull of redundant hyphens affect the language in any way? Well, only by making it easier and a little more logical. It's an eminently sensible idea. The thing is – and it's been niggling at my mind since I read this – there are implications to this kind of top-down language ruling. Imagine if the Oxford had decided to simplify English spelling, or any of the other irrational aspects of English. People have been suggesting that dictionaries rationalize the language since the invention of dictionaries, and recently they have been steadfastly refusing to do so. Does this mean that dictionaries are taking a more interventionist role?
Actually, I don't think so; I think they're just realizing they were behind the times on this one. As the Oxford University Press style guide once said, “If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” (Or should that be styleguide?)
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