I love grammar. I love English. I love books. On a daily basis I think that I should have been an English major...and nixed the whole psychology major idea. You wouldn't be able to tell from my awesome use of appropriate grammar on this blog...but I heart it big time.
This brings me to something I read today...in the newest edition of the 'Shorter Oxford English Dictionary' 16,000 words have lost their hypens!! What-the-effspice? I love hyphens. I hyphenate words constantly...heck I even hypenate whole sentences when I am feeling a little crazy...and what has all of this led to? My beloved hyphens going extinct...
For example the word 'bumble-bee' will now be 'bumblebee' and 'ice-cream' will now be 'ice cream'...I know crazy right?! I bet all of you are as outraged as I am...right?....Right?! I bet all of you are dying to know why this is happening...well no worries I will hip you to the genius reasoning behind this move.
"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for…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. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned." Yep....this gem of a quote came from the editor of the Shorter OED...so basically people are getting lazy and can't be bothered to use a 'messy-looking hyphen'...whatevs...
I blame texting and twitter for this...even though I love my texting I so blame it for the extinction of the hyphen.
And-now-I-am-done-with-this-because-I-bet-I-am-the-only-person-in-the-world-who-is-going-to-miss-the-hyphen-but-do-not-fear-blog-friends-the-hyphen-is-alive-and-well-on-Always-Alexandria.
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4 comments:
WHAT?! This is the craziest thing I've heard all week. What jerks. Not that I am an expert at using hyphens (I never knew ice-cream was hyphenated...) but let me just tell you I put them where I want, when I want and I still will! No, they won't take my hyphen away!
You go! Fight the power girl...fight it hard!!
how lame is that?!
i mean, i wasn't confident in my formal hyphen usage. but i-am-known-to-hyphenate-complete-sentences-as-well!
hmph. we shall continue the use of this punctuation!
[also, i am an english major, and punctuation gets on my nerves. way too picky. but i still like it!]
I like hyphens, but sometimes I use one in a word and look at it, and I'm just not sure if it's correct!
I-also-love-to-hyphenate-entire-sentences! :D
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