globeandmail.com: Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens
globeandmail.com: Bye-bye (or is it byebye?) to 16,000 silly hyphens
“[T]he new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification. They changed most of the hyphenated words – such as leap-frog and ice-cream – by turning them into one word (leapfrog) or two distinct words (ice cream).
There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly.”
I never did understand hyphens, anyways. Good riddance.
