Anyone know articles or videos or just have some ability to infodump in the reblogs about hyphens and the (seeming?) decline of hyphenated words in English?
Like there are some really obvious ones like "e-mail" becoming "email". Indeed most e-anything dropped the hyphen. That seems like it could just be society becoming more familiar with it, and using the word more often and dropping it to save a keystroke. But it seems to me that I am always having to tell my spellchecker to accept non-hyphenated versions of compound words, because the hyphenated version just does not look right. This post was spurred by the FF spellchecker claiming it should be "re-implemented" not "reimplemented". As a computer person, the hyphenated version looks absurd.
Of course spellchecker dictionaries aren't always the best, but on occasion if you look it up Merriam-Webster.com or whatever you will find the same sort of thing. Not for "reimplemented" of course you just get the base word "implement" but I have seen other cases where they give a hyphenated version not the unhyphenated.
And, if you look at like newspapers from like, the 30s or something, it seems like you see hyphens all over the place. Like sometimes they hyphenate "to-day" and I don't mean just for a line break. What's up with that?
On open, closed, and hyphenated compounds
This is good and all, and talks about familiarity, but is it just that that is driving it? And familiarity wouldn't seem to be the case for weird stuff like sometimes hyphenating "to-day". Especially since it seems like they didn't always do it.
