Shed-a-tear-for-the-hyphen

The New York Times reports the impending death of the hyphen, with word that 16,000 hyphens have been eliminated from the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English dictionary.

The dictionary is not dropping all hyphens. 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.

What’s getting the heave are most hyphens linking the halves of a compound noun. 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.

[Thanks to the daily blog of Quill & Quire magazine for alerting us to this story.]