Hype and hyphenation

So farewell then, brave hyphen. There have been numerous articles published recently lamenting the loss of the hyphen from our punctation armoury. This flourish of obituaries (not sure what the collective noun should be for obituaries: garland? Threnody? Chrysanthemum-cushion?) has been prompted by the latest revision of the OED, which removes hyphens from terms such as figleaf and leapfrog. See this Guardian article (one of many). (Seriously, how often do they revise the thing? Five-yearly, the article claims. I'm sure I see these stories every fortnight.)

Personally, I'm hoping that reports of the hyphen's demise have been exaggerated. Not least because my surname sports one - or at least it does when companies' processes can support it and the customer service rep understands what I mean when I spell my name. In common with other hyphenated friends, I've had apostrophes, slashes and question marks before now.

But my fears for the beleaguered hyphen's future go beyond my personal connection. I'm afraid that I have become a hyphen stickler. To be fair, hyphens have only recently joined my list of Things To Fume About When Spotted On Tube Posters. And they're not particularly high on that list. (Comma splices and inappropriate apostrophes in its jostle for the top spot.) I'm not so worried about fig-leaf vs figleaf; I think either is perfectly acceptable, and the same goes for most other composite nouns. But I have become someone who can write 'we need the up-to-date file from you so that we can check all corrections are up to date' with a calm smile. In other words, my urge to hyphenate (most) pre-positive compound adjectives will easily pummel my urge for consistency into the floor.

It's fair to say I have a love-hate relationship with hyphens. It's interesting that even the mighty Fowler's is ambivalent about the tricksy little blighters. In the latest edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, there's a lengthy quotation from an inconsistently hyphenated (not inconsistently-hyphenated) newsletter, followed by a bignomous exposition on the subject. At the end, there's a haughty mutter: 'hyphening should not become burdensome'. But then there's the Fowlerian equivalent of Mutley's sassenfrassen: 'But that newsletter… should have been tidied up, nevertheless'.

Fowler's recommends considering a rewrite (eg rewriting early-nineteenth-century poets to poets of the early nineteenth century), which seems eminently sensible, and backs up my own personal rule about difficult grammar and punctuation: if in doubt, cheat. If a sentence causes your brain to rotate screech-rusty cogs in its comprehension engine, it's likely to have the same effect on your readers.

I find hyphenation very difficult to explain to clients. On more than one occasion I've been instructed to remove all hyphens, regardless of their syntactical worth. In one case, this one-out-all-out rule has swept en dashes away too (which I could easily rant about for another two days. I'd blame Lynne Truss, but it's not really her fault). It's a growing phenomenon: lists of verboten terms and punctuation marks are burgeoning – mandates that go well beyond traditional style guides. I look forward to being banned from using semicolons soon – or commas, perhaps.

A quick PS: there's a nice discussion of the issues here. It includes an example of the problems hyphen-removal can cause from Monty Python, which I'd forgotten: the difference between a man eating blancmange and a man-eating blancmange. Perfect.