Abbey Marie
09-22-2007, 10:58 PM
Nooooooo!
Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on By Simon Rabinovitch
Fri Sep 21, 10:57 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - 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).
The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.
"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070921/od_nm/britain_hyphen1_dc_1;_ylt=AlWB_dtegziggfh859KZlVEL 1vAI
Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on By Simon Rabinovitch
Fri Sep 21, 10:57 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - 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).
The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.
"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.
...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070921/od_nm/britain_hyphen1_dc_1;_ylt=AlWB_dtegziggfh859KZlVEL 1vAI