The dog-end of the world
FELLOW word protector Michelle Leon has introduced me to Time magazine’s Newsfeed website, which features a weekly column called Wednesday Words. In last week’s instalment, Kathy Steinmetz condemned the abuse of the hyphen. Every day, thousands of hyphens are bludgeoned with uncalledfor violence in the motherinlaw of behind the scenes battles.
Steinmetz had the grace to note that the site for which she writes is guilty of the very sin that plagues her. (Its name is actually NewsFeed, in line with the mania for bicapitalisation — or BiCapitalisation — embraced by PayPal, DreamWorks and MasterChef. I EsChew it.)
Her rant was in response to an announcement by the New York Times about e-mail, which in the pages of that esteemed journal will henceforth be referred to as email. That might not be too bad a development, in the general scheme of developments, but it is a sign of sinister things to come.
Hyphenicide is all around us. The innocent punctuation mark that helps to clarify meaning and ease pronunciation is in danger of disappearing entirely and becoming longforgotten.
In her indispensable book, Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynn Truss warns about the plot against the hyphen. There will always be a problem getting rid of it, she says: “If it’s not extramarital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts.”
But now we see extramarital sex everywhere. The words have been conjoined without the polite chaperoning of a hyphen. Similarly, ready-made has become readymade, home-made is homemade and co-operation is cooperation, which, as a reader of this column once pointed out, sounds like the body corporate of a henhouse — or a parliament of fowls, perhaps.
Mashing words together as you would bananas and tuna for a baby hedgehog may allow you to say more on Twitter, but it creates pronunciation purgatory for foreigners trying to learn English. Say “homemade” phonetically and you’ll understand why. It could be a kind of lemonade.
We need hyphens. There are words that look ridiculous if married without the legitimacy of a little stripe. A doll-like face is attractive; a dolllike face is plain hideous.
There are also words usually kept separate that in some cases cry out for the bridging hyphen. “We have 200-odd staff members” is a very different thing from: “We have 200 odd staff members.” Truss gives the example of a pickled herring merchant — without a hyphen between pickled and herring, the temperate merchant might unfairly be labelled a drunk. I was distracted from the hyphen by a report about Corgis. There are allegedly only 241 Pembroke Welsh Corgis — the ones that cut a dash between members of the British royal family — on the British Kennel Club’s register. Fewer than 300 means the breed is in trouble. The report speculates that Corgis have become less desirable since the docking of their tails was banned. Seems no one wants a dog that waves its tail like a hyphen all over the place, in case it shatters Royal Doulton teacups (which, incidentally, used to be hyphenated).
To some, the endangered status of the Corgi is sadder than the threat to the hyphen. I don’t know how he feels about Corgis, but Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, doesn’t give a toss about hyphens. He justified the docking of 16 000 hyphens in recent updates of the dictionary with the claim that the hyphen is “fussy and old-fashioned”. I don’t think he really meant it though. If he did, he’d have said “oldfashioned”.