Sixteen thousand hyphens have disappeared. Quite where they are now, no one is sure. Maybe they’ve been traded with the Germans for a group of dissident umlauts. Perhaps they’ve simply been recycled and turned into Sudoku boxes. Nobody knows, and let’s be honest, nobody cares.

If people were really worried about the decline of the hyphen, which has been nigh-on summarily struck from the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary with everything from leapfrog to pot belly having a hyphenectomy, then there would be protests. Men would be on the streets waving banners like “Save the hyphen for the grammatically-curious-but-ultimately-indecisive!” But they aren’t. Why is that?

If you listen to the dictionarycompilers, they’ll tell you the decline of the hyphen is down to our timepoor society. We simply don’t have time to stretch over the keyboard and, most likely, use our ring fingers to tap a key. This is doubly inconvenient as our ring fingers are already busy wearing rings and have their work-life balance to think about.

Such an argument, however, only does so much mustardcutting. After all, without the hyphen there would be no nose in any emoticons.

“My emoticon’s got no nose!”

“Why, how does it smell?”

“Smell? It’s a supposedly humourous typographical innovation!”

The truth is that the decline of the hyphen is indicative of a new confidence among the literate. They don’t need grammar telling them what to do any more. Like the natural world, and plasticine, man has conquered language, subjugated it to its will and is now happily toying with it, seeing which bits will fall off first.

As time goes on, our mastery will only become more complete. Particularly when relaying messages about what we want for our tea and why you just can’t trust politicians nowadays. Elements of language that have no practical use will be skimmed off like so much syntactic scum.

I can see, for example, a future where the possessive pronoun (ie John’s Blackberry Curve 8310 Smartphone) is completely abandoned. Either that, or its use is heavily expanded, a mark after John denoting that the subject is in possession of something, and we can’t be bothered to say what it is. In this eventuality, media moguls and Russian oligarchs will be permitted two apostrophes after each mention of their name, as they own more.
As the blinkers slip off we will realise that there’s no end of linguistic roadblocks to be torn down, or semantic speed cameras to be shot at with the air pistol of innovation. They are obstacles we can undo ourselves; all we need fear in return is the risk of incomprehension. But is that not the fate that befell, Eliot, Joyce, Cussler? And did not that done right turn out the end in?

Observer