Anyone seen the hyphens?

International English seems to have developed a rule: never, ever use a hyphen, ever, on pain of death. I really want to blame American English here because that is where I find it is most prevalent, but I’m seeing this everywhere now, even in the UK. Hold my tea and crumpets while I have a rant!

As an outsider looking in — and as a purveyor of fine, British English dictionaries — I find this, in a word, strange. I am a British English purist, down to very my last atom. It was the dialect in which I learned to spell at school, and with which I continue to spell today.

Besides the usual -ise versus -ize which irks me, I’ve noticed the growing trend in the UK now, particularly in the media, to remove the hyphens between two words. For example, the two words “on” and “screen” become “onscreen”; this is bad English, no matter where you’re from! Close-up or close up is written now as “closeup”. Whatever next?

Then there is longtime, thinktank, nonessential and reacquired…these are not words. They are two separate words which must contain a hyphen. They should always be written as long-time, think-tank, non-essential and re-acquired, respectively.

Both re and non are prefixes, therefore the general rule is to add a hyphen after the prefix and before the word which is being prefixed. “Long” and “think” become prefixes in their respective phrases and will need hyphens as well, or a space, at the very least.

Dammit, this is not that difficult. It is one extra character, one additional glyph, for goodness’ sake! Why the shorthand? As if not having that hyphen will somehow save the planet by skimping on one bit of data. I would begrudgingly accept the occasional bending of the aforementioned rule if this was going on in printed media — what, with actual, physical page space, and all that — but no, this is in digital media of all places.

As with all rules, there are indeed exceptions, and those exceptions are fully documented and accepted. For example, “reapply” and “nonconformist”, to name but two. “Bedroom” is another common one and “living room” is most definitely NOT “livingroom”.

As a matter-of-fact will look weird written “as a matteroffact” but I have seen that, too. God save the king! Whatever has come over editorial departments?

In other unrelated things which make Cybrkyd go black and white and read all over, it really puts a lemon in my milky tea when I read a novel which was published in the UK, written by a British author but is in fine American English prose. First of all, why would the author do that? Secondly, their editor needs a good spanking for allowing such an abomination. I would understand if the publisher was US-based ( <-- see? a hyphen works well there, too) but maybe this is a technical issue with the editor’s spell checker? Is the UK-based editor person an American? If so, maybe they felt the same way I do about spelling and converted the whole manuscript from en-GB to en-US. Meh! Who knows?

I wonder what written English will look like in 30 years from now. I do wholeheartedly (or whole-heartedly; both, in fact, are correct) accept that all languages evolve, but thisdirectionisgettingverysilly.

And, don’t get me started on this latest fad for writing in lower case. Grrr!