Save-Our-Hyphens
Unlike the Spanish language with its Real Academia, the English language has no official body that governs its use. This is a good thing, as it allows English to be more plastic, to grow and evolve faster.
If a century ago, people commonly wrote “coöperate,” using the dieresis to break the dipthong into two syllables, now we write “cooperate.” Everyone knows that the two vowels are not pronounced like a long “u,” which is how they would sound if you wrote, “coop.” (But even that isn’t necessarily true. If you saw a sign at a university that read, “Student Coop,” wouldn’t you know that there is no dipthong? Of course you would. That’s common usage.) Anyway, the pronunciation of the word “cooperate” – to go back to our example — has not changed, only the way we spell it. Nobody ordered the change. People started to spell it that way until it became the common practice.
The premier dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, for short), monitors usage, records neologisms, and keeps the record straight on etymology and meanings.
Recently, the BBC reported that the editors of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in its sixth edition removed the hyphen from 16,000 words to reflect how these words are written today. In some cases, words that had been written with a hyphen became two separate words. “Fig leaf,” “Hobby horse,” “Ice cream,” “Pin money,” “Pot belly,” and “Test tube” are some examples. In other cases, they became one word: “Bumblebee,” “Chickpea,” “Crybaby,” “Leapfrog,” and “Logjam.”
Perhaps anticipating angry protests at the offices of the OED, editor Angus Stevenson clarified their role in the demise of the hyphen. They were and continue to be mere observers. He told the BBC, ”We only reflect what people in general are reading. We have been tracking this for some time and we’ve been finding the hyphen is used less and less.” He even offered an explanation. The reason fewer people use the hyphen these days, he told The Telegraph, is that they no longer have the time to reach over to the hyphen key.
Above is a picture of the standard QWERTY keyboard. In the upper right, next to the zero key, is the hyphen. To produce a hyphen, you do not have to depress the shift key at the same time, the way you have to do with the macron, which shares the same key. All you do is extend a finger, most conveniently the right fifth finger, nicknamed the “pinky,” and tap it. How much time can that take?
In any case, Mr. Stevenson need not worry — after an exhaustive search of the Internet your correspondent was unable to find any call, angry or otherwise, to protest the demise of the hyphen. To everyone at the OED: sleep safe and sound.