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Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens

RUSSELL SMITH

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

Latest comment posted at 11:46 PM EDT 13/10/07

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 ...Read the full article

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  1. Jim Brennan from Canada writes: That’s a relief. Now I can read about Paris, Hollywood without concern for slipshod style.
  2. Unabashed Opinion from Toronto, Canada writes: Hyphens in nouns are a pain in the butt.
    Hyphens in adjectival phrases are a pain-in-the-butt necessity.
  3. Kay Ay from Canada writes: This will take years to make a real difference.
    It will also take years before everyone's spell check is updated.
    I stopped hyphenating daycare long ago but it always ask: day-care??

    I'll have to let my mom know about this. I'm sure she will have an opinion.
  4. Pete G from Toronto, Canada writes: I like the line that states that modern tecnology (or something like that) necessitates a more streamlined way of communication; which is a fancy way of stating that people are just too lazy and ignorant to learn the rules of English grammar. There's evolution, and then there's devolution. Language changes, but not always for the better. 'Leapfrog' just looks wrong!
  5. Vladimir Kolcza from Toronto, Canada writes: Since most Canadians have what at best can only be described as a fleeting familiarity with written English grammar in any case, this article is superfluous. The disregard for etymology favoured by the ignorant and the uncultivated is routinely tarted up in the guise of "being responsive to technological change." This actually "sells" to people unfamiliar with the cornerstones of literacy and the role they play in the formulation of new and clear ideas. Ignorant postings are, under the present sorry circumstances, only to be expected. More's the pity.
  6. John E7 from Saltspring Island, Canada writes: Oh joy! My copy editor wont take as long correcting my manuscripts for all of my hyphen abuses.
    But Canadian publishers will still charge way too much for international bestsellers despite them being a bit lighter ;)'
  7. Samantha ramesar from Canada writes: etymologists everywhere should rise up. riseup? for that matter: every where?
  8. Samantha ramesar from Canada writes: Does the globe and mail publish a style guide?
  9. Paul Jones from kitchener, Canada writes: so this authors promoting lazy writing practices? figures. whatever makes life easier for him eh? the digital age should have nothing to do with how we write our language down on paper. not that i really care, but if we're attacking grammer that 'doesnt make sense' we'd have to re-write the entire 'english' language here in N. America.
  10. Brett Tremblay from Canada writes: If the author actually believed (or understood) what he wrote, shouldn't he have taken the hyphen out of "email"?
  11. MJ Patchouli from Regina, Canada writes: Isn't removing the hyphen from compound words just part of language evolution? Two words used together often become a hyphenated word, until common usage has everyone using it as one word, and then that's what it is.

    I'm with Pete G: nobody bothers to actually learn two correctly write the language any longer.

    It's the apostrophe abuse that kills me -- and people who don't know the difference between its and it's. Worst of all: people who think its' is a word. And people who put caps on words for no apparent reason. And people who use that when it should be who.

    Okay, I am a stickler. Stick-ler'
  12. MJ Patchouli from Regina, Canada writes: So I used the wrong to. Hilarious. Irony.
  13. Brett Tremblay from Canada writes: MJ, I thought that was a deliberate typo to test whether anyone caught it.
  14. Michael Manning from Mississauga, Canada writes: In listing all the abuses of English that are annoying, MJ Patchouli from Regina, Canada writes: "And people who use that when it should be who."

    How about folks who start sentences with a conjunction?
  15. Megan Holsapple from Northwest Territories, Canada writes: I assume from this that Mr. Smith's last column included another serious grammatical error involving hyphens. In his typical style, his response is that hyphens don't matter. I love it.
  16. Vladimir Kolcza from Toronto, Canada writes: MJ Patchouli from Regina, Canada writes "...nobody bothers to actually learn two correctly write the language any longer..."

    MJ Patchouli, your contribution serves to underlined my earlier posting and put it in "bold".

    Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am, SO GLAD that we sent our children to private schools. They are all trilingual and write rings around the average Canadian university graduate - not that that is much of an accomplishment, as I always remind them. The University of Toronto recommends "remedial English language instruction" to 85 percent of Ontario-educated freshmen every year. This statistic was published by the G & M both in 2006 and 2005. But people didn't twig onto it because Canadians are smug and just don't bloody care...
  17. Rollo Tomasi from Belgium writes: If you really wish to be annoyed regularly by english useage here, get to know Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.
  18. Noone Anywhere from Canada writes: Smith might want to know that English has been losing hyphens for centuries and centuries. (To-day was once hyphenated.) It's an ongoing evolution, and that evolution, as hyphenated words become a more common part of the language, has nothing at all to do with email (which also lost its hyphen).

    As for the benefits of "streamlined" text that isn't "prickly with hyphens," I don't recall, in thirty-odd years of working with words and English literature, anyone's complaining about the pages of Dickens being "prickly with hyphens," or the plays of Shakespeare -- one of the greatest inserters of hyphens because he coined so many new words -- being "prickly with hyphens." Maybe readability and comprehension should hold more sway than pretty looks -- but then again, the Globe does emphasize superficial appearances these days.
  19. Garrett Nicolai from Regina, Canada writes: Hyphens have always been an amusing conundrum, and a misplaced hyphen can be more confusing than a forgotten glottal stop. I don't know exactly where I stand on this topic, but combining words into larger compound words can get ridiculous. In German, compound words rarely, if ever have hyphens, and can occasionally reach amazing lengths. This does set dangerous precedent for hyphenated names as well.
  20. Kevin Dooley from Canada writes: Yes, as a couple posters have pointed out, hyphens are part of the natural evolution of language. It's particularly notable in technical jargon, which tends to develop at a faster rate than more work-a-day (or is that workaday) words like "ice-cream". So, for example, nice words like "photovoltaic" started out life with a hyphen. And, as the word became more and more common and people started to think of it as a discrete concept of its own, distinct from the component words, the hyphen disappeared. Similarly, in computing we have already seen the activity of "web hosting" turn into the discrete activity of "web-hosting", which will very soon be rendered simply as "webhosting".

    And there's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction. I do it all the time, and my copy editor has given up on me so that makes it officially correct.
  21. Gwilyn Timmers from Canada writes: I have a colleague who capilatizes the M in email, and I have no idea why.
  22. David Stanley from montreal, Canada writes: no it's
    Bye,bye
  23. Iain's Opinion from Canada writes: Wen kan we start speling it the way it sounds?
  24. Iain's Opinion from Canada writes: We need to realize that all of the people determining our spelling were illiterates when they were born. (yes i meant to say that)
    We have stolen words and rules from just about every language on earth.
    example i before e except after c unless it's in a name or title. (scientist)
    This kind of bafflegab gives us such things as gaol and jail being pronounced the same way. Quaint but dumb. And really, why do we have silent letters? Knife? Get real it's a nyf!
  25. Alexander Jablanczy from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: They are one third of the way there in elimination of hyphens. But they missed the next great revolution in ortho graphy which will be differential spacing. By this I mean that instead of full letter space only or none there should be half space between semi united words and full space as now between obviously distinct words and oneandahalf space when that is called for. This orthographic or spacing revolution is obviously made possible as we have now similar capabilities when we write here at the keyboard not on the type writer which did not make such finely differentiated spacing possible. The greatest revolution in mathematics was the invention of O zero, in effect nothing space void or nullity. Similarly in orthography about two thousand years ago space between words was invented. Etruscans still wrote run on boustrophedon. The Romans only left to right with letter space between words. There was an intermediate phase when / was used. It took the next two thousand years to invent the next step which I am proposing here somewhat analogous to partial differential in calculus. Not d but rounded delta d. So lets hear it for half space. Half space could also be used for George Bernard Shaws proposal the elimination of the apostrophe. Full space is excessive no space is erroneous apostrophe is redundant so half space would solve this problem as well. So halfspace instead of apostrophe and hyphen even in compound words which words have fused into one but also when one wants to emphasize the etymology of words such as ortho graphy. Or to assist pronunciation or analyse a word or even to differentiate between two possibilities as the examples in the original article so amply demonstrate. Or to simply break up monstrous megawords which of course plague German more than English. So half spacing between not fully fused units of a compound word full space as is now and...
  26. F M from Toronto, Canada writes: To paraphrase Fowler in his guide to English usage: dispense with the hyphen when the novelty wears off!
  27. Alexander Jablanczy from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Sob sob sob.
    My attempt at carefully exemplifying my proposal bombed on the run on no paragraph permitted no double space that is letter space terroristconformist typestyle of G&M.

    In my illustrative examples I used double space for one single space for half.
    But that was verboten. Ach.

    The idea was if anybody got it to use halfspace between both fullspace nospace and hypheneliminated word conjunctions.

    Ah well if GBS failed why not me?
  28. S S from Western Canada, Canada writes: Ice cream was supposed to be hyphenated? News to me but then again now that it isn't anymore I guess I can say that I have been ahead of the times (purely joking). I never used hyphens, never will. They have no purpose to me. Bye-bye? Just say "Bye". There's no need to repeat yourself. E-mail? eMail??? email? ( I really like the big "M". I've seen that as well.) I'm not an English major or a writer. I struggled in school academically but excelled mechanically. The hyphen makes no sense. Just write the word and I'm sure the world will understand or get the jist.
  29. John Doucette from Manotick, Canada writes: On my last trip to Great Britain I had the opportunity to speak to the editors of this edition who advised that the prime reason for this deletion was that the average journalist could not be taught to use the hyphen properly. The next edition may delete the question mark for the same reason.
  30. J. Coffey from Toronto, Canada writes: As I just said to my friend Sheila...those black-mailing two-faced half-baked double-crossers! Harumph!
  31. Alex Jenkins from Markham, Canada writes: Perhaps the style gurus at the Globe will chip in and buy a copy of SOED so they can update their hyphenation rules. For example, it's not uncommon to see such eye bogglers as "labour-relations matters" in stories discussing the Labour Relations Act and, in today's paper, "a new energy-efficiency program". In both cases the hyphen is an unnecessary device that slows reading as well as being a waste of ink!
    Alex Jenkins
    Founder and (still) Sole Member
    Anti-Hyphen Society
    Motto: "Hyphens if necessary but not necessarily hyphens!"
  32. Shamus M from Canada writes: How about "50, year old kittens." No hyphen.

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