#621 Joining Words

The other day was a slow news day. Not enough blood emerging from war, gang activities or Unabomber types.
So all the news outlets had stories about hyphens. Or rather, the removal of same.
The world is aghast—bumblebee is now one word!
Apparently, the Oxford English dictionary, the final noumpere of all things English, has decided to remove the hyphens from a number of words.
Yes, the innocence of these young compound words is finally lost. They are old enough and with enough usage to be de-hyphenated.
Removing the hyphen is apparently a fairly painless process. Oxford just does it. Oh, they claim it’s the people who do it already. The word email, for instance, used to be hyphenated, but the public refused to accept it as such.
Oxford blames the laziness of typing types. Seems emailers and others are too lazy to reach all the way up to the next row on the keyboard to tap a hyphen. Nestled up there, as it is, between the zero and the equals sign, why it might as well be a distant parking place at a health club.
Huh. I for one was remarking to myself the other day, as I went to various websites and typed in the @ sign for the jillinoth time, that that top rank left pinky finger key is seeing more use than ever in the 21st century.
The hyphen is too—when people make those handcrafted emoticons—the colon for the eyes, the close parenthesis thingie for the smiling mouth and, yes, the hyphen for the nose.
The hyphen makes a better sideways smiley-face nose, apparently, than it does a bridge between words that are not quite compound and not quite separate.
There are 16,000 words Oxford altered one way or the other. Ice cream is now two words, no hyphen, as is pot belly, test tube, and fig leaf.
Well yeah, I haven’t send a fig leaf hyphenated since Adam.
Words that became one are crybaby, logjam, and bumblebee.
I don’t ever remember hyphenating bumblebee.
Which may be why it’s become the buzz-word of this whole deal.
America, ya gotta love it