15. The Hyphen Strikes Back

MOOD ----> Eccentric, as usual
POST TYPE : ARTICLE
LISTENING TO - Evanescence - My Immortal (Instrumental)

Some time in the recent past, the OED dropped hyphens from 16,000 originally hyphenated words in one go. Predictably, the itchy blog fingers of the literary world rushed to the crime scene and delivered their postmortem reports and conspiracy theories about the hyphen. However, because I was busy NOT reading blogs at that time in 2007, I didn't notice this. Most of these articles dealt with how "ice-cream", "cry-baby", and "bumble-bee" would now be "ice cream" , "crybaby" and "bumblebee"(i.e., in the dictionary as well). Here's one of those articles, and I suggest you read it to understand my outrage at it : "Demise of the hyphen"

In any case, like I said, I'd been completely ignorant of this news report, though I did experience some deja vu reading it.
Until someone at work posted a link to one of these articles on the company intranet. Spurred by the word "demise" applied to something as undeserving as a hyphen, I ranted off a reply to it. Here it is:

While everyone has been speaking of the hyphen's "demise", I was drawn into the hyphen's apparent conspiracy for its survival. Yep, the hyphen, or at least its creators, are the originators of a plot that's been around [sic] since at least the birth of printing. The very purpose of the hyphen ensures both its seeming demise, and its actual resurgence.

Here's why.

The hyphen, regardless of what it was originally intended to do, is a method of legalizing inexistent words now. Just as pot-belly was slang once, and potbelly is acceptable today, the first step towards a compound word getting official OED sanction is using the hyphen. Until we use a hyphen, the compound word isn't one, its two words. "Ice cream" would have been added to grammar textbooks, with "ice" as an example of a modifier for "cream". If not for the hyphen. If today, its an accepted OED freshman, its because of its association with the outcast hyphen.

In other words, the very words that seemed to have lost their hyphens, exist only because of it. The hyphen is like Cupid. Two words meet because of it, and then, it leaves, having served its purpose. (I never knew a hyphen could get me this mushy.)

In addition, while the news article that hinted at the hyphen's death seemed to presume that informal writing and e-mails have made people less inclined to hit the hyphen on their keyboards, it has also made people lazier at looking up or learning the right word for what they intend to say. In most probability, given English's tendency to swipe words for new objects from other languages, and even otherwise, they won't find any proper, acceptable word in most cases, that doesn't draw a few "what-a-nerd" jeers from others. For example, "what-a-nerd" has no known substitute. That's two hyphens, right there. One each for fig leaf and pot belly. Take that. Creative writing is the new breeding ground of the supposedly extinct hyphen.

For every fig-leaf or pot-belly that the OED ditches, for fig leaves and pot bellies, there will rise a "what-a-nerd" or a "don't-talk-to-me-that-way look" to resurrect the hyphen in its own hippie, counterculture avatar. The hyphen may not be official, or approved, but its one damn good survivor.

The John-Rambo-meets-Nelson-Mandela of punctuation.

4 more hyphens there.
Amen.