quote: LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.
And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).
Nearly all the words they list in the article are those I've never hyphenated anyway. But then again, I'm not a Brit.
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: I have never seen "ice cream" hyphenated before. Interesting.
When did they get rid of the "d" in iced cream? Does this bode ill for iced tea?
And when will eventhough hit the dictionary?
On the bright side, for those of you who miss the hyphens, you can still get hyphens in some of those if they're at the end of the line and you have automatic hyphenation turned on.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Maybe wordsCompoundedEvenToRidiculousLengthsLikeInGerman should be written in camel case, yet somehow the difficulty in parsing is part of the charm, so I think not. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Language really evolves, eh? I still use hyphens where reasonable just to improve legibility and out of habit, but now that even Oxford is changing its dictionary, I might feel an urge to follow.
Posts: 10 | Registered: Mar 2004
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I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of punctuations suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
The ingerman part got me for a second too. Until I noticed that the conglomeration reminded me of my german class...drr.
Posts: 686 | Registered: Sep 2001
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All right. Ever willing to play the fool, I will ask the dumb question. What does that ending mean if not "like Ingerman"? Does the fact that I know absolutely no German make that question any less foolish?
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Sometimes my brain gets so stuck on first interpretations that I can't see new ones unless they are quite literally spelled out for me -- no amount of hints in this thread, even though I knew we were talking about the German language, let me see that as "like in German" once "like Ingerman" was in my head.
*runs off with tail between legs*
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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It's okay, nobody speaks this languagewhereweruntogetherallthewords yet besides a few friends and I. Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Zanejin: Language really evolves, eh? I still use hyphens where reasonable just to improve legibility and out of habit, but now that even Oxford is changing its dictionary, I might feel an urge to follow.
I think you've got it backwards. Oxford updated the dictionary to more closely follow actual usage. They're not trying to lead usage, because that's not what dictionaries do.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by brojack17: I don't see why the internet made it an issue.
I don't think it did. I think people just love to blame the internet for the alleged dumbing down of the language.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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Don't hyphens just disappear as words get normalized into the language? Or was that a you're-a-writer-but-not-much-of-a-linguist type of question?
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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