Say It Isn't So!

Shall we prepare an obituary?

Hyphen falls victim to the email [sic] society
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
The U.K. Telegraph

It's small, flat and a useful piece of punctuation. The hyphen, according to the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, is becoming extinct, a victim of the text message and the email. [SPOGG: HE MEANS E-MAIL.]

The sixth edition of the dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns.

Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one-word status and leap-frog is now leapfrog.

The reason, says Angus Stevenson, editor of the dictionary, is that we no longer have time to reach over to the hyphen key.