I recently read an interesting article from Reuters about the hyphen. In the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 16,000 words have lost their hyphens, due in part to designers' dislike of the way hyphens look in advertisements and on the internet. In addition, Angus Stevenson, editor of the dictionary, notes that people are not confident in their use of hyphenation. They don't really know why hyphens are used.

Is this breaking news? Will it change the way we write? I'm not so sure. While I am aware that compound adjectives require hyphens, I didn't realize that some words (ice cream, bumblebee, water bed, chickpea) had hyphens in the first place. Apparently, my good friends Ben and Jerry were not aware of the hyphen in ice cream, either.

Lack of knowledge about a grammatical rule is not enough to change it, however. The writers and editors of the Shorter OED conducted much research in making their decisions about hyphens. They analyzed the use of words in newspapers, books, websites, and blog entries from 2000 to the present. So, just becuase a few people don't really get when to use a semicolon, for example, it does not mean that the punctuation mark will go by the wayside.

For more information about the changes to hyphenated words, take a look at the article "Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on" by Simon Rabinovitch.

If you want to brush up on grammar and punctuuation, take a look at the following books:

A grammar book for you and I-- oops, me! : all the grammar you need to succeed in life / C. Edward Good
The brief Penguin handbook / Lester Faigley
The grammar bible : everything you always wanted to know about grammar but didn't know whom to ask / Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas
The Oxford essential guide to writing / Thomas S. Kane
Punctuation plain and simple / by Edgar C. Alward and Jean A. Alward
100 words almost everyone confuses & misuses / from the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries
Eats, shoots & leaves : the zero tolerance approach to punctuation / Lynne Truss
or others we have in the library.