#SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY BITT FULL#

When reading off a screen, it is difficult to see these punctuation marks. The hyphen has been re-invented as a substitute for punctuation - the colon, semi-colon and even brackets have all but disappeared. The rot set in when people stopped writing to-day and to-morrow. As the house-style guide of Oxford University Press used to say, 'If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.'

Indeed, it is a mistake to make a fuss about punctuation unless clarity or actual meaning is at stake. One knows through common sense that a walking stick, which used to be walking-stick, is a stick for walking (a verbal noun + a noun) rather than a stick that walks (a participial adj. The use of a hyphen to yoke two nouns has declined because, quite simply, it usually isn't necessary. With the hyphen, Mr Stevenson notes: 'It's starting to look a lot like something your grandmother might write.'Ī selection of your comments appears below. But to much of the rest of the world, it's email. The likes of the BBC and the New York Times are fighting a valiant defence of the hyphen.

One battleground is the word e-mail itself. There has to be a negotiated common ground but within that there's room for variation and a degree of creativity.' 'I tell my writing classes the hyphen is there to help the reader and to show either that two words are linked in some significant way or to add understanding in words like go-between and de-icing,' she says.

#SHORTER OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY BITT FULL#

Chris Robinson, who edits for Scottish Language Dictionaries and gives classes in advanced writing at the University of Edinburgh, says she has bigger grammatical fish to fry, with undergraduates often needing an explanation as to the difference between a noun and a verb and where to place a full stop.

Shorter oxford english dictionary bitt