Bye...hi...hyphen? Geddit? Oh, well.
The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is out and instead of the usual media articles about all the funny new words included in it (WAGs, yummy mummies and size zero all make an appearance BTW, and there is at least one story about the new words here), the focus has this time been on a tiny little piece of punctuation: the hyphen ("-"). According to an analysis of the new dictionary, hyphens are dropping out of usage. So words that used to be hyphenated such as bumble-bee are now compounded into one single word, while others such as ice-cream and pot-belly are now written as noun phrases e.g. ice cream and pot belly.
As this interesting article on the BBC News Magazine site tells us, the blame is again being laid at the door of email and electronic communication. Others are arguing that the hyphen is not dying our but being re-purposed (or should that be repurposed) as part of emoticons like the smiley :-)
It's not the first time the decline of the hyphen has been noted, as this story in 2003 demonstrates in almost exactly the same terms. And for more detail on the whole story, have a look at The Language Log blog here.
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates
Black British English vs MLE
The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...
-
As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will pr...
-
As lots of students are embarking on the Language Investigation part of the Non-Exam Assessment, I thought it might be handy to pick up a fe...
-
When Dan asked what he should post about next on this blog, one of the most common responses was this, the World Englishes topic. Maybe ...