Dehyphenation

A Reuters report Sept. 21 told of the dehyphenization of about 16,000 expressions in the newly published Shorter Oxford Dictionary's Sixth Edition.

Some formerly hyphenated expressions lose their Oxford hyphen—e.g., hobby horse, ice cream and test tube; others become one word, such as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

The report appropriately prompted e-discussions, one of them started by Reuter alumnus Charles Frankel, who lives in the U.S.A., and including a current Reuterian Julie as well as Reutalumnus me, cm 10-10-07:

From: Charles, Monday, October 1, 2007 Subject: hyphens

Carl, When my wife's father died in the late 1960s, we inherited his third edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. It has been a goldmine (gold-mine?) of information since; I consult it frequently. I will not be buying the sixth edition but I appreciate the articles on the disappearing hyphen. I still write "teen-age" with a hyphen because, at one time in my career, I was told teenage was some kind of fodder. I use a hyphen when it is useful.

But I do not know whether to describe the United States as fuckedup, fucked-up or fucked up. Whatever the answer, this country of mine is in a mess. --Chuck - - - - - - -

From: Carl, Fri, 05 Oct 2007 (amended 10 Oct 2007)

Chuck: My Concise Oxford is more modern than your third edition (1934), being a "Fourth Edition, 1951, Reprinted (with revised addenda) 1956." Its dark-blue (darkblue? dark blue?), cloth binding held together for many years with Scotch tape.

I also possess the so-called Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the two-volume word bible, a 1986 Reprint (“With Corrections”) of the 1944 Third Edition. It is a 2,700-page abridgement of the 15,000-page, primary Oxford Dictionary of 1879. It took seven Oxford U. abbreviators and three Leeds U. helpers 30 years to put together the first Shorter edition of 1933. (I acquired my Shorter 20 years ago at a bookshop sale in Maidstone, Kent, for 40 pounds/$100 Cdn.)

By the way, my Shorter gives 15 lines of definitions and usages of fuck, remarking of that word that it was "Until recently regarded as a taboo-word [now a tabooword?] and rarely recorded in print." It hyphenates "fuck-up. A mess. muddle."

My 50-year-old Concise Oxford has fuck all to say about fuck. --cm 5-10-07

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From: Chuck Saturday, October 6, 2007
Subject: Re: hyphens C O R R E C T I ON

Carl, Sorry, I got mixed up with "Concise" and "Shorter." I have the "Shorter"; make of that what you can. The cover of the first of my two volumes also is held together by Scotch tape. Perhaps we could make a fortune by figuring how we could stick hyphens to prefixes and suffixes.

My wife drives me somewhat crazy by using a single hyphen when she should use two of them for a dash - but no one is perfect. –Chuck

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From: Agnes, Tuesday, October 9, 2007
To: Carl, Chuck Subject: Re: hyphens

What about your Canadian Oxford Dictionary? What does it say? Agnes

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From: Chuck To: Agnes Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Agnes: It depends on how the Canadian dictionary pronounces a-bout. – Chuck

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From: Carl, Wed. 05 Oct 2007
Agnes and Chuck:

Good call, Agnes. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary of 1998, Editor-in-Chief Katharine Barber, 1,730 pages (Canadian English: 250 Years in the Making), may well be the bellwether in the Internetera dehyphenization movement, nine years ahead of the new Shorter.

Take a look, for example, at Canadian Oxford verbiage that precede Shorter’s changes: —e.g., hobby horse, ice cream, test tube and such combos as bumblebee, crybaby and lowlife.

By the way, there is yet another Oxford dictionary hereabout (hereabout/hereabouts one word in all four of our Oxfordicts) -- namely, the encyclopedic Oxford Reference Dictionary, 1986, 994 pages. It’s a bit preWeb passé with its hobby-horse, ice-cream and test-tube along with bumble-bee, cry-baby and (no lowlifes allowed) leap-frog.

Chuck: As for the F-word, or is it Fword, its aforementioned absence from the Concise Oxford and a sparse 15 lines in the Shorter, the OxReference allows a meagre 5-1/2 lines, including your unhyphenated “fuck up—to mess.”

It gets down to this: The Canadian Oxford wins on the F-front handsdown, so to speak. It does fuck up in hyphenating the noun fuck-up (“a mess or disastrously bungled matter,” or “a person who is a chronic loser or failure”).

But it does provide a compendiously Canadian 18 usages as verb, noun, adverb, adjective and general expletive—including politely defining “fuckhead” as “a person considered with contempt.” --cm 10-10-09 #

From: Carl Thu, 11Oct 2007

This discussion of hyphens-or-not and Oxford dictionaries is in danger of becoming overdone, overworked and overwrought (all three over-words appear hyphenlessly in olden Oxfords).

Nevertheless, two important corrections are necessary:

First:

In referring Oct. 10 to Oxford dictionaries retained in this home, I cited four--the Concise, the Shorter, the Reference and the Canadian. Even while reporting that, a fifth rested before my eyes, a finger-reach from this iBook computer.

It is The Little Oxford Dictionary, a long-ago gift from my mother, its clothbound 638 pages little enough to fit into a trouser pocket. It is the dictionary I mainly use to check a spelling or a meaning. First published in 1930, mine is a 1951 reprint (“with Corrections and Revised Addenda”) of the 1944 Third Edition.

Just as the current Shorter Oxford editors accept the impact of Internet lingo in making their changes, the Little Oxford’s preface cites such influences of its time as “the wider spread of American books and journals; of cinema captions and of the new power of wireless. . . .”

Still, the Little one hyphenates bumble-bee, hobby-horse and ice-cream. There is no crybaby nor cry-baby, no test tube nor test-tube. It makes no mention of lowlife, although there is a citation of “lowbrow (slang) unintellectual.”

Perhaps with that in mind, there’s not an F-word to be seen.

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Second:

In naming the Editor-in Chief of the Canadian Oxford, I misspelled her first name.

It’s Katherine, not Katharine, Barber—a blasphemous typographical error in identifying a renowned Canadian lexicographer, despite her having been born closer to Cambridge than Oxford. (see following).
Apologetically, cm 11-10-07

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http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/cw2w3.cgi?p=banfield&t=42205&d=757
Katherine Patricia Mary BARBER
BARBER, Katherine Patricia Mary, B.A., M.A.; lexicographer; b. Ely, Cambridgeshire, England 1959; e. Univ.of Winnipeg B.A. 1980, B.A. (Hons.) 1986; Univ. of Ottawa M.A. 1990; EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, CANADIAN DICTIONARIES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CANADA 1991-- ; Lecturer, Sch. of Translation & Interpretation, Univ. of Ottawa 1984-91; Rsch. Assoc., Bilingual Cdn. Dictionary, Univ. of Ottawa 1989-91; Roman Catholic; Mem., Euralex (Eur. Assn. for Lexicography); Dictionary Soc. of N. Am.; Am. Dialect Soc.; Office: Don Mills, Ont. –Canadian Who’s Who 1997

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Barber
Katherine Barber From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Katherine Patricia Mary Barber (born 1959) is a Canadian lexicographer and Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

Born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree University of Winnipeg in 1980 and a Master of Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1990. From 1984 to 1991, she was a lecturer in the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research associate with the Bilingual Canadian Dictionary project at the University of Ottawa. In 1991, she was Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Dictionaries for the Oxford University Press in Canada.

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http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/702-6634910-8188051?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-ca&field-author=Katherine%20Barber
Books "Katherine Barber" Showing 1 - 12 of 18 Results
1. Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Jun 30 2004)
2. Canadian A to Z of Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation by Katherine Barber (Paperback Feb 2006)
3. Paperback Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Paperback - Mar 2006)
4. Only in Canada You Say: A Treasury of Canadian Language by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Mar 15 2007)
5. Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso,and Tom Howell (Paperback - May 2005)
6. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Aug 8 2007)
7. Oxford Canadian Thesaurus of Current English by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Paperback - Oct 2006)
8. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something To Do With Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Paperback – Mar 07)
9. Compact Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber, Robert Pontisso, and Heather Fitzgerald (Hardcover - Nov 2006)
10. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs: and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady by Katherine Barber (Hrdcvr - Mar06)
11. Student's Oxford Canadian Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - May 2004)
12. Concise Canadian Oxford Dictionary by Katherine Barber (Hardcover - Oct 2005)

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Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

By Simon Rabinovitch

LONDON, Sept 21, 2007 (Reuters Life!) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem with that, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from the year 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?
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Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:
fig leaf hobby horse ice cream pin money pot belly test tube water bed
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Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
bumblebee chickpea crybaby leapfrog logjam lowlife pigeonhole waterborne #