It's small, flat and a useful piece of punctuation. The hyphen, according to the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is becoming extinct, a victim of the text message and the email.
The sixth edition of the 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 and leap-frog is now leapfrog. The reason, says Angus Stevenson, editor of the dictionary, is that we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.
| I won't tolerate it, you know. The world needs hyphens. Some-day we'll want them back. I've rented a large storage-container to hold them until the world comes to its senses. It's in Dahomey, if you want to drop by and visit them. |
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