Chuck the Hyphen

No, it’s not an anthropomorphised punctuation mark.

Earlier today at lunchtime I was skimming through a book first published in 1926 and noticed that every “today” and “tomorrow” was printed / spelled like “to-day” and “to-morrow.”

I kinda like that antiquated way of spelling.

Apparently, hyphens in hyphenated words don’t have a very long shelf-life. Uh, shelf life. Seems I read somewhere the word “teen-ager”, with hyphen, was first coined in 1941 (can this be true?) but by the late 50s was routinely spelled “teenager.”

Similarly with other words. “E-mail” was the current spelling way, way, way back in the 90s when it first became widespread. Nowadays even the OED – Oxford English Dictionary – writes it as “email.”

And further research (eh, about two-three minutes on Google) tells me that American print tends to chuck the hyphen out a lot sooner than our older, stodgier British cousins.

That being said, back to regularly scheduled blogging

to-morrow.