Is the hyphen doomed?

According to a story by Finlo Rohrer published September 20, 2007 in the BBC News Magazine, the answer is "yes."

Here's the piece.

Small object of grammatical desire

It's small. It's flat. It's black. And according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, its numbers are shrinking. Welcome to the world of the hyphen.

Having been around since at least the birth of printing, the hyphen is apparently enjoying a difficult time at the moment.

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog.

The blame, as is so often the case, has been put at least in part on electronic communication. In our time-poor lifestyles, dominated by the dashed-off [or should that be dashed off or dashedoff] e-mail, we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.

And English, being a language lacking any kind of governing body and instead relying on studies of usage, is changing to keep up.

Shorter OED editor Angus Stevenson doesn't want anybody to get angry over the hyphen's decline.

"We only reflect what people in general are reading. We have been tracking this for some time and we've been finding the hyphen is used less and less," he says.

"It will probably upset a few people but the point I would make is that we are only reflecting widespread everyday use. We are not saying it should be dropped completely."

Geoffrey Leech, emeritus professor of linguistics and English language at Lancaster University, agrees that there has been some decline in its use.

Data drawn from a wide range of publications taken in 1961 and 1991 suggested a 5% decline in hyphen usage over the three decades. He thinks e-mails may be part of the answer.

"When you are sending e-mails, and you have to type pretty fast, on the whole it's easier to type without hyphens. Ordinary people are not very conscious of the fact of whether they are putting hyphens or not."

Chris Robinson, who edits for Scottish Language Dictionaries and gives classes in advanced writing at the University of Edinburgh, says she has bigger grammatical fish to fry, with undergraduates often needing an explanation as to the difference between a noun and a verb and where to place a full stop.

"I tell my writing classes the hyphen is there to help the reader and to show either that two words are linked in some significant way or to add understanding in words like go-between and de-icing," she says.

"Language is always changing. It has to move with the times. There have to be conventions. There has to be a negotiated common ground but within that there's room for variation and a degree of creativity."

One battleground is the word e-mail itself. The likes of the BBC and the New York Times are fighting a valiant defence of the hyphen. But to much of the rest of the world, it's email.

With the hyphen, Mr Stevenson notes: "It's starting to look a lot like something your grandmother might write."

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On a related note is the ultimate hyphen battle, that being whether or not to use it in the word "mashup."

The New York Times is itself so befuddled that it sometimes uses the hyphen and other times omits it.

In the spirit of less is more, you know where I stand on the issue.