RIP Hyphens

I have a hyphenated last name, and the computers at the college I am attending CANNOT handle it. It is very annoying.

On the other hand, I actually ran into someone who didn't know what a hyphen was a few weeks back, and that is worse.

At least now I know where to place the blame.

It's okay. I use double hyphens all the time to represent a dash because there's no !#$$ing dash button on a keyboard. What the hell is that?! And yet we need a caps lock button-- truly the single button that spawned the most assholes EVER

Haha! See? I did it again.

tes—ting

tes—ting 2

ok, those were (remove spaces)

& # x 2 0 1 4 ;

and

& m d a s h ;

so if you type
blablabla " & m d a s h ; " blablabla without the quotes,

your result will be:

blablabla — blablabla

er, sorry for this - — - delete as needed. Should have been on I Love HTML (or whatever it's called)

I think I have talked here before about the great open-source text editor I downloaded that had zero idea what an em-dash or an en-dash was, and then when I looked at the developer's forums they were like "sorry, there is no support yet for minor, arcane typographical marks like dashes" -- as if a dash were the equivalent of trying to set special Thai mathematical notations in your text.

The "pressures of the internet age" angle is ridiculous: hyphens have been steadily dropping out of ever-more-familiar compounds since long before the invention of the auto-mobile. I'm always surprised that Webster's still prescribes "good-bye."

This article is really weird. Webster's 11th doesn't hyphenate any of the words that the Shorter OED has changed, nor would it occur to me to hyphenate any of them. "Ice-cream"? "Bumble-bee"? Seriously? Is it 1905? (For the record, Webster's also closes up "hobby horse" and "pot belly.") I mean, you can blame the Internet all you like, but I think this is more akin to the natural evolution "to-day" and "to-morrow" than anything else.

That was an xpost.

It's all these damned teen-agers thinking they live in the world of to-morrow.

jaymc completely OTM.

And StanM if you think I am typing all of that instead of two hyphens you're crazy.

Does anyone else get the feeling the article's writer has tried to squeeze in a couple of still-hyphenated words on purpose? Not enough to be ridiculous, but still: they're there...

(xpost)

:—(

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

what-a tot-al-dor-k-.

Hyphens will now be known as "Emoticon Noses"

HAHAHAHAHA

No-iPod-for-an-emoticon-nose

Then, without the usual intermediary period of hyphenation, as 'emoticonoses'.

I thought messy and old fashioned was still hip. Or at least McSweeney's-style still seems to be all rage.

I guess that's why T. Herman Zweibel's column no longer runs in The Onion.

My orthography, not to mention my grammar, has always been and will always be highly idiosyncratic.

T. Herman Zwiebel is MY MANG. McSweeney's, not a man or my man.

This article is really weird. Webster's 11th doesn't hyphenate any of the words that the Shorter OED has changed, nor would it occur to me to hyphenate any of them. "Ice-cream"? "Bumble-bee"? Seriously? Is it 1905?

Bumble-bee is crazy, yes. I don't think ice-cream is, that crazy though. I'd prefer ice cream, mind.

Faffing with all that HTML em-dash (ha!) stuff seems a little OTT.

Just doing alt+hyphen for en-dash or shift+alt hyphen for em-dash works with a Mac, on ILE at least.

–
—

See!

_

Shift Option dash.

—

Wgat is this "Alt" of which you speak?

Alternately, WHAT.

Well, modern Mac keyboards have "alt" written on the option key, to help fit in with the rest of the world a bit more.

That is heresy.

It's kind of funny that Macs sell themselves as being more intuitive than PCs, yet have these keys supposedly called "option" and "command" which have nothing on them but inscrutable symbols (in the case of the latter, two inscrutable symbols.)

You know—MY option key has "Alt" written on it. I never noticed!

It's written really tiny. The thin edge of the fucking wedge.

However much hyphens may atrophy from familiar and much-used compounds, the hyphen will always be a necessity to those of us who like to coin new compounds for those special situations that are always cropping up unexpectedly, such as "subcutaneously-burrowing ninnies", or "scale-ascending borborygmy". So long as we live the hyphen shall never die!

I just noticed that there's a WHOLE OTHER OPTION KEY AND COMMAND KEY AND CONTROL KEY on the RIGHT side of my spacer bar! EGADS! How could I have failed to notice? Obv. I type with two fingers, BUT I DO SO WHILE SCRUTINIZING THE KEYBOARD! I HAVE A BLIND SPOT! My right eye is for shit, it's true, but at this rate I may as well have it removed.
I AM A DIM-WIT.

Oh god, now I am being ostracised. I should have kept quiet.

RIP hymens

However much hyphens may atrophy from familiar and much-used compounds, the hyphen will always be a necessity to those of us who like to coin new compounds for those special situations that are always cropping up unexpectedly, such as "subcutaneously-burrowing ninnies", or "scale-ascending borborygmy". So long as we live the hyphen shall never die!

As OTM as it gets.

Basically, the hyphen was invented so that English teachers could continue to diagram sentences in the usual way without having to deal with cancerously adjectival adverbs.

It's kind of funny that Macs sell themselves as being more intuitive than PCs, yet have these keys supposedly called "option" and "command" which have nothing on them but inscrutable symbols (in the case of the latter, two inscrutable symbols.)

some of us have been using Macs long enough to remember when there was an "open apple" key and a "closed apple" key, where one was just an outline and the other was filled in.

question: co-operation or cooperation?

coöperation

Seriously, though, I'd close it up, but I pretty much bow to Webster's on any spelling-related issue.

cool, chalk another one up for the hyphen-killers.

(hyphen killers?)

However much hyphens may atrophy from familiar and much-used compounds, the hyphen will always be a necessity to those of us who like to coin new compounds for those special situations that are always cropping up unexpectedly, such as "subcutaneously-burrowing ninnies", or "scale-ascending borborygmy". So long as we live the hyphen shall never die!

I love hyphens & some days I get paid just to sit around creating them, but "subcutaneously burrowing ninnies" should not have one.

Yay! I'm 100% with you on that, EK.