Fryman, one of my favourite sources for unsolicted blog fodder, sent me an article from the Globe and Mail detailing the mass genocide of 16,000 innocent hypens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Formerly hyphenated words will either become new compound words (pigeonhole, waterborne and chickpea) or separated into two distinct words (test tube, water bed and hobby horse.)
In many of these cases, the Oxford was merely catching up with usage: Waterborne, for example, is probably used by the majority of newspapers anyway. (But as if to prove how arbitrary this all is, the old Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors has long given waterbed as one word. Aren’t these books published by the same company?)
Of course, the Shorter Oxford retained some hyphenated phrases to avoid ambiguity: They will permit the phrase “twenty-odd,” meaning “approximately twenty,” because to say “twenty odd people” has a somewhat different meaning. Copy editors lo
I quite admire the hyphen, it's one of my favorite forms of punctuation. It allows me to jockey-together my own grammar and re-spelling, aids in tmesis (that's a-whole-nother post), and prevents confusion when dealing with ambiguous phrases.The humble hyphen even has its own mascot: Hyphen-Boy. Here is Hyphen-Boy standing up for the rights of smart children to play in the streets while not offending the developmentally challenged by emphasizing the lack of hyphen between slow and children. Sure, a comma would have sufficed, but the presence of a comma doesn't say nearly as much as the absence of a hyphen. And in case you didn't know, the Illuminati have declared a global moratorium on using any obvious punctuation on road signs, especially commas and hyphens. So Hyphen boy gets the job done under the nose of the punctuation-hating Illuminati.The whole point of grammar is to avoid confusion by clarifying language. Without the hyphen, readers might not know if you're discussing an a
By Daniel MoroChoosing a good domain name is one of most important steps in setting up your online business, but it’s getting harder and harder to find good names that are still available. You could use a domain name with hyphens, but is that really a good idea?Let’s quickly review what makes a good domain name. A domain name needs to be relevant, easy to remember, keyword optimized, and free from trademark conflicts. It should also be shorter. Although seven characters or less is ideal, you may have to settle for a domain name that’s a little longer.So you’ve just set up your new barbecue grills business and now you discover that barbecuegrills.com is already taken. Should you consider hyphenating the domain name to barbecue-grills.com or should you go back to the drawing board?The first choice should always be to take the name without a hyphen. Having established that, there are some exceptions. Let’s look at hyphenated domain names and when they are might be good to use.Do
It Makes Them Easy to Read.
Most of the desirable one-word, two-word, and three-word dot com domains are taken. However, if add plurals and hyphenated terms, there is still some gold left in the domain name game. If you find that you need or want to use a phrase or a compound word with two or [...]
