16,000 words sent to the hyphen graveyard

[jimmy olsen]

Good!  Hyphens are the devil!

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/07/jay-z-joins-to-day-and-ice-cream-in-the-hyphen-graveyard/277932/

Jay-Z Joins To-Day and Ice-Cream in the Hyphen Graveyard
'About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.'
Spencer Kornhaber Jul 18 2013, 4:14 PM ET

Jay Z, formerly Jay-Z, has dropped the hyphen from his name. Presumably he did this because he felt like it.

But maybe there's another reason. The Internet is killing hyphens, at least according to this 2007 Reuters article about an update of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (flagged today by former Atlantic editor Justin Miller). That edition of the reference guide took 16,000 formerly hyphenated phrases and either fused their two components together--a la "bumblebee," "chickpea," "crybaby," "leapfrog," and "logjam"--or split them apart: "fig leaf," "hobby horse," "ice cream," "pot belly."

Dehyphenization predates the Internet, of course. "Today" was written as two words until around the 16th century, when it became "to-day" until the early 20th century, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. But the phenomneon has apparently ramped up recently.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," Shorter OED editor Angus Stevenson told Reuters at the time.

But judging from his "fuck hashtags and retweets" and "Internet / I aint even into that" old-man-isms off Magna Carta Holy Grail, Hov might not like the idea of being seen as an online-trends chaser. Luckily, Stevenson served up an aesthetic rationale for ditching hyphens as well: "Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. ... The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

"Messy"--very not Tom Ford, very not Jay Z. It all makes sense. I'm just surprised he didn't pull this move before. He's been into delinking words for a while now: "I'm a business, man, not a businessman."

[CountDeMoney]

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," Shorter OED editor Angus Stevenson told Reuters at the time.

That's not the fucking hyphen's problem.

Luckily, Stevenson served up an aesthetic rationale for ditching hyphens as well: "Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. ... The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

Not the fucking hyphen's problem, either.

Good!  Hyphens are the devil!

You've got bigger problems with the English language than hyphens, ass-hole.

[mongers]

I like hyphens.

Don't approve or ice cream, but am ok with ice-cream or icecream.

[Eddie Teach]

It's ice cream, grandpa.

[mongers]

It's ice cream, grandpa.

I'm happy to go with what Chambers say, ice-cream. 

Just because the OED does something doesn't mean we all have to follow suit.  We have no Académie française equivalent here.

[Eddie Teach]

We're not following OED, they're following the people who make and label the product.

[Admiral Yi]

Connoisseur needs to rethink it's packaging.  Particularly for chocolate variants.

[Syt]

Living language changes over time. Film at 11.

[garbon]

I don't understand why we would get rid of the hyphen. Even if you don't want it for compound words, still useful in places that you don't want to use a semi-colon. Ah! A hyphen!

[Brazen]

If English were to replace all hyphenated terms with compound words it would be no better than German.

As Mark Twain said: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective."

Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung and out.

[Ideologue]

I don't understand why we would get rid of the hyphen. Even if you don't want it for compound words, still useful in places that you don't want to use a semi-colon. Ah! A hyphen!

That's an em dash.  Which for some reason isn't on keyboards.  It's retarded.  I use 'em all the time.

Now, looking at Wikipedia, the en dash is something we could (and basically have) gotten rid of as 100% useless.

[Duque de Bragança]

It's ice cream, grandpa.

I'm happy to go with what Chambers say, ice-cream. 

Just because the OED does something doesn't mean we all have to follow suit.  We have no Académie française equivalent here.

Unfortunately Yet, sometimes all the Académie does is offering some guidelines.

[Maximus]

Hyphens are like dating for words. If it works out they get concatenated.

[Capetan Mihali]

a semi-colon. Ah! A hyphen!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon

http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/Semicolons.html
"A semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought.

When a semicolon is used to join two or more ideas (parts) in a sentence, those ideas are then given equal position or rank."

[merithyn]

It's ice cream, grandpa.

If separate, it should be iced cream. Otherwise, it's icecream.