Online Insider » hyphens http://www.onlineinsider.net Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:20:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 Take That, Hyphens! http://www.onlineinsider.net/2007/09/21/take-that-hyphens/ http://www.onlineinsider.net/2007/09/21/take-that-hyphens/#comments Fri, 21 Sep 2007 21:01:00 +0000 Marydee Ojala http://onlineinsider.onlineinc.com/2007/09/21/take-that-hyphens/ A news report from Reuters this morning informs me that about 16,000 words are no longer hyphenated in the newest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I feel vindicated, after 30 years of screaming at people not to hyphenate the word online. I can’t find it at the moment, but in the very early days of ONLINE magazine, Jeff Pemberton, then both the publisher and the editor, I think, ranted in an editorial about why hyphens were inappropriate when it came to online (and ONLINE). It’s online, not on-line. Although I was tempted to describe Jeff as the then-editor, I resisted temptation and restructured (re-structured?) the sentence.

I did find it amusing that the editor of the Shorter OED, Angus Stevenson, used two hyphenated words in his explanation of why he had assassinated hyphens: design-led and old-fashioned. Yeah, both look old fashioned to me.

And when was the last time I saw ice cream rendered as ice-cream? Can’t recall, it must have melted from my memory.

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