There has been a general trend over recent decades towards the simplification of English; one example of this is the much-reduced use of hyphens. The very useful, commonsense Guardian and Observer Style Guide (available online at https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide) quotes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, from Rodney Huddleston’s Introduction to the Grammar of English: ‘The transition from space to hyphen to close juxtaposition reflects the progressive institutionalisation of the compound.’ Quite.
As New Hart’s Rules (The Oxford Style Guide) points out, the use of hyphens is to some extent a matter of taste; what matters most is consistency. Nevertheless, the volume offers six pages of rules and advice on when to hyphenate, and when not. Perhaps the most useful guideline to remember is that a compound expression which precedes a noun is usually hyphenated (‘an up-to-date rule’), whereas, when following the noun, it is not (‘the rule is up to date’).
The Guardian and Observer Style Guide remarks that words which begin life with a hyphen often drop them over time: they quote as examples wire-less and down-stairs, which would now look eccentric if hyphenated. However, it also refers to ‘some old-fashioned souls who still hyphenate e-mail’, which I have to confess that I did, until recently (in fact, probably until I read the style guide!).
An historical footnote on the hyphen: as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I recently read Gale Stokes’ excellent account of the fall of the Soviet bloc, The Walls Came Tumbling Down. This introduced me to the so-called Hyphen War – a dispute about what Czechoslovakia should be called after the fall of the Communist regime, which had suppressed antagonisms between Czechs and Slovaks. Essentially, the Slovaks wanted a hyphen, and the Czechs didn’t; the former also wanted Slovakia to be capitalised after the hyphen. In the end, the name adopted was the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, but the dispute foreshadowed the eventual ‘Velvet Divorce’ and the peaceful creation on 1 January 1993 of two separate states.
Of course, the issues at stake were much more profound than orthography, but it does goes to show how apparently small elements of language can make a difference on a larger stage.
