SHECKYmagazine: Trailblazers yet again!

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on September 25th, 2007

From FOS Don Munro comes word of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

Hyphens are the latest casualty of the internet age, with more than 16,000 words losing their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary published this week. 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.

Doubles that have become one include pigeonhole, leapfrog, chickpea, lowlife, and touchline, while the twos include fig leaf, hobby horse, test tube and water bed.

The dictionary blames electronic communication, which favours speed over grammatical correctness. “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the new edition.

“They’re not really sure what they are for. 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.”

Munro knows that we knocked the hyphen out of stand-up when we published our first edition of SHECKYmagazine.com back on April 1, 1999. We did so for purely selfish reasons– we knew that, if the magazine took off, we’d be typing that word thousands of times, so why not eliminate a few thousand keystrokes?! (Plus, while we’re pretty speedy on the keyboard and we are adept at no-look touchtyping, we still goof up the hyphen with regularity!)

Originally, the decision hurt us, as the search engines insisted on making the fine distinction between the two versions of the word– our mag didn’t come up very high in the results when folks searched for “stand-up.” Improvements in search engine algorithms and more of an acceptance of the unhyphenated version have solved that problem!

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