The Hyphen: Khattam-Shud!

February 1, 2009, 9:17 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

The following articles touch on the new Short Oxford English Dictionary that apparently as severed around 16,000 hyphenated words:

Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on – Reuters

Small object of grammatical desire – BBC

An excerpt from AskOxford.com: “Lovers of the hyphen, look away now: it seems to be on the way out. Drawing on the evidence of the Oxford Reading Programme and our two–billion–word Oxford English Corpus, we removed something like 16,000 hyphens from the text of the Shorter. So it’s double bass, not double–bass, ice cream not ice–cream, makeover instead of make–over, and postmodern rather than post–modern. Other spelling changes made as part of the updating of the text include cafe for café, fetus for foetus, kaftan for caftan, and raccoon for racoon.”

Okay, they’re way behind on ice cream! Regardless, how did the Oxford dictionary go about researching the usage of these words, i.e., where’s the proof of this drastic 16,000 word change?

Well, I haven’t found any answers yet, but all of this compound-word-yakking reminded me of Salman Rushdie and his prevalant use of the compound word.

Rushdie typically takes the cliche, the known, the alltoofamiliar, and combines them with no hyphen(s). It is a small, yet potent device to shake our minds free from the mundane, redundantly canned conversations we have everyday. (Albeit, an important social function in the correct context–not to be discussed here.) Rushdie’s character, Saleem, however, uses ‘adverbs and hyphens’ to explain something a profound about the relation between words and the people who use them.

The jpg at the bottom is an excerpt from “The English Novel and Prose Narrative” by David Amigoni. It briefly discusses the survey of ‘Historiographic Metafiction’ by which this excerpt focuses on Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight Children’ (of which I will discuss later). Firstly, I should reference Amigoni’s explanation of ‘Historiographic Metafiction’ (HM). Amigoni summarizes HM by saying:

[HM is] a concept which traces the generic similarities between narrative fictions and narrative histories. ‘Metafictions’ of this variety prompt us to see the possibility that histories of a public, professional kind are, of their nature, as materially fictional or ‘made’ as novels. (135)

Okay if you survived that (I am not so sure I did), here is the exciting and pertinent aspect as it relates to the subject at hand (the hyphen, remember?). He notes a historian, Haydn White’s, views of metahistory and the linguistical affects/reflex on history:

…there is always a linguistic dimension to historical narration, which makes the view of the past one narrates an effect on the combination of tropes, or figures of speech, one chooses to use, rather than the ‘truth’ of what happened.

And so there’s the crux of it: the bending and twisting of our corporate language will also bend and twist our reality. We should all realize that it is never what we say but it is how we say it that affects the message and our selves!

Back to Rushdie, his character Saleem in Midnight Children takes an introspective look at his word choice and the reflection it has on not only himself but his country:

This ‘entwining’ or circular relationship of Saleem with his world, his nation, and the stress of his use of hyphens makes me wonder how the official severance and conjoinment of 16,000 words affects/reflects us as a world of English speakers. What does this say about our society?

This is where I have not looked for thoughts to ‘answers’ but my thoughts are drifting East towards Orient languages, like Chinese, where their written language has remained very similar to what it was throughout their history. What is really interesting is that Chinese is riddled with compound words, combining what words they have inbound to make a new word, e.g., electric + brain = computer and coffee + color = brown. The language is inverted, never borrowing but from its own. Anyways, I’m spent for now…Khattam-Shud!

________Here’s the larger excerpt from Amigoni’s book________