Hyphen-aided prose

So maybe we should ask The Journal Gazette, in its now hyphenless incarnation, to become The JournalGazette:

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).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

One of the reasons for still using a hyphen is for clarity's sake rather than for the rules of grammar. The example given in the story is to say that "Twenty-odd people came to the party" to make it clear that 20-some people, not 20 odd people, came to the party." An example I learned early in my career is to write about "small-businessmen" to make it clear we are writing about men who own small businesses, not small men who own businesses.

The general rule in constructing compound modifiers is that a hyphen isn't needed if people are used to seeing two words together. Thus, we would write "high school students" instead of "high-school students," because people are used to seeing "high" and "school" next to one another. But we would write "rain-caused accident" because people aren't used to seeing "rain" and "caused" next to one another. Our newsroom has recently decided that "health care" has reached that level of familiarity, so we may write "health care plan" instead of "health-care plan." I wouldn't have thought so, but it's a close call. The Associated Press stylebook kept calling for "teen-ager" for 20 years after the whole world had stripped the hyphen from the word.

When the JG dropped its hyphen, by the way, our then-editor, Joe Weiler, cut out hundreds of hyphens from news stories, put them in a cardboard box and delivered them to the other newspaper. "I heard you lost these," he said to them.