The Online Reflector

By Nicki Crisci
Opinion Editor

Editors at Oxford recently decided to make some drastic changes to the Oxford English Dictionary; they opted to give the boot to more than 16,000 hyphens in the new sixth edition, leaving people hard-pressed to find out why this change occurred—or in fact, just hard pressed.

Most of the hyphens that were dropped were from compound nouns such as water-bed and ice-cream. Other words, such as bumble-bee and cry-baby, are being crunched together to form just one word.

In an article from the Oct. 7 issue of The New York Times, the Oxford editor Angus Stevenson said, “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore. They’re not really sure what they’re for.”

Just because people don’t know what hyphens are for does not mean they can’t learn how to use them. The most basic way to find out how to correctly use hyphens is to look them up in the dictionary in the first place.

Now that the dictionary is changing all these hyphens that might be considered silly or outdated, the desire to look up such words may decline for the less-than-ambitious students across the country.

Hey, if you didn’t know that there was a hyphen in bumble-bee, why bother to know now, right? No. This change is like obesity for the mind. By eliminating hyphens, we are in gradually succumbing to ignorance and lessening our chances of learning new things.

Hyphens are far from being obtrusive and silly.

Hyphenated words sprinkle the stories of great authors quite beautifully. Who could forget such mind-blowing images as Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” or Shakespeare’s “green-eyed jealousy.”

They add to writings a special element that would otherwise be absent without such a distinction in descriptive nouns.

It is simply mind-boggling to believe that the editors of the dictionary would decide to delete so many hyphens from our language when they have served such a good purpose over time.

This leads to many questions on my part.

Will Microsoft Word come out with a new update for its system involving the extinction of hyphens? Will English professors across the country have new grammar problems to tackle? Or will people just become lazier, knowing that there are words now that they can fail to punctuate correctly?

We must still have some stability to hold onto while every aspect of life is modernized. What kind of a society will we become when we no longer have variety in our paragraphs? The hyphen-less writings will be as monotonous as the computer screens from which we now read e-books any day of the week.

This change also leaves one to wonder what they will decide to get rid of next.

Will colons and semicolons be eliminated because no one is quite “sure what they’re for,” because people weren’t taught how to use them the right way?
Oxford may have the influence of their authority, but I for one will be a cry-baby mourning the loss of 16,000 hyphens and give them a home in my articles and other writings.