Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on
Submitted by Jakob on Mon, 2007-09-24 13:02.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.Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly. And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).
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We should organize a march to protest the slaughter!
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Keystrokes, keystrokes, keystrokes...help prevent carpal tunnel, annihilate all hyphens.
Seriously, it's difficult to keep up with all the changes in the language since the dawn of the Internet age. I find some words don't work well sans hyphen, though. Co-worker always reads like cow orker to me, and co-op like coop, as in chicken coop.
Im waiting for them to get rid of the apostrophes in contractions.
There is no thief like a bad book
--Italian Proverb
I was at dinner with a grad student at Cornell, very smart writing teacher with a bent for Austen, and she said she never knew that it's was NOT the proper way to denote possessive. Who makes all these decisions? Is the OED the standard? Because it's not the best source for American English. I love the revolution -down with wasteful markings.