Oolite Bulletins

Mad Dan Eccles wrote:

Argh! No! Not a hyphen!

Wars have been fought over less.

Oxford University Press blog wrote:

As modern English has evolved, some compounds have stayed “open” as two words separated by a space (snow tire, fire hose, water cooler), while many others have become “closed” with no intervening space or hyphen (snowman, fireplace, watermelon). The hyphenated version is very often a way-station (way station? waystation?) between an open compound and a closed compound, as the form becomes more entrenched in written usage (hand writing becomes hand-writing becomes handwriting). But very often there’s variation among open, closed, and hyphenated possibilities. Is it ice cap or icecap? Show-stopper or showstopper? Different dictionaries will give different advice. What the Shorter editors found, with assistance from the Oxford English Corpus, is that there’s an increasing tendency to choose an open or closed form over a hyphenated form. Fig leaf, hobby horse, and water bed stay open, while chickpea, crybaby, and logjam stay closed.

Some compounds are in no danger of losing their hyphens. It’s hard to imagine the standard spelling of mother-in-law changing to mother in law or even more strangely motherinlaw (though there are no doubt some people somewhere who choose to spell it that way). And we seem to like using hyphens to set off certain prefixes like all-, ex-, quasi-, and self-, as in all-encompassing, ex-wife, quasi-legal, and self-esteem. Moreover, when it comes to prefixes, the hyphen is favored when the root word is capitalized (anti-American, pre-Christian) or when two vowels need to be separated (anti-intellectual, pre-eminent). But with prefixes too, there are no straightforward guidelines for when to hyphenate, and some hyphens simply fade over time as a word becomes more common. Yesterday’s post-modern is today’s postmodern.