It’s official: people are lazy!
In the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, about 16,000 words have lost their hyphen, simply because people are too bothered to remember to use it.
For instance, bumble-bee is now bumblebee and ice-cream is ice cream.
In the age of text messaging and downsizing thoughts to 140 characters, people have forgotten how to use the hyphen, and thus, it has been stripped away from many compound nouns found in the dictionary.
Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, explained:
“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.”
This is rather disheartening, no?
Next thing you know, we’ll be teaching first-graders how to abbreviate words before they learn how to spell them correctly.
Welcome to the 21st century!
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