The misuse of the apostrophe and the appropriate use of the hyphen — questions that have plagued teachers of English and editors for generations — could soon be at an end, according to a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English that is predicting their possible demise.
According to the dictionary, published on Thursday by the Oxford University Press, the misuse and omission of apostrophes has become so commonplace it threatens to undermine the rules that govern its use.
When to write ”its” and when ”it’s” has long plagued schoolchildren, but now the frequent appearance of tomato’s on greengrocer’s price tags is creeping into written English everywhere.
”It’s quite common to find the unorthodox use of apostrophes in newspapers, journals and books. Officially, it is still regarded as poor style and wrong, but over time it may become acceptable,” co-editor Angus Stevenson said. He noted the apostrophe was disappearing from ”Let’s go” and was being introduced needlessly elsewhere.
Turning to the hyphen, he said: ”Our research showed that overall the hyphen is now used only half as much as it was 10 years ago.”
This had occurred despite its new, and wrong, use in verbs, such as in: ”Now is the time to top-up your pension” or ”This website was set-up by Vicky”. The new usage derived from the nouns in sentences like: ”It’s time for a top-up”.
Stevenson said that up to 30 years ago, compounds formed by placing one noun in front of another had generally been hyphenated, as in ”fish-shop” or ”dog-bowl”, whereas in modern usage the nouns were either written separately or run together, as in ”website” or ”airfare”.
Tim Austin, the author of The Times Style and Usage Guide, said that it would be a ”great pity” if the hyphen disappeared. ”It enables language to be used in a fuller and richer way, as indeed does the apostrophe,” said Austin, who recently retired after 10 years as chief revise editor of the newspaper.
Among new words listed are:
Blamestorming. A meeting to decide who in an organisation is to blame
Cyberslacker. Someone using the internet in office time
Shotgun cloning. Inserting DNA into a recipient by genetic engineering
Jumping the shark. Stretching a sitcom plot to an implausible point, derived from a sitcom in which a character escaped by jumping over a shark. – Sapa-DPA