Hyphen Intacto

(TOI - 26/sept/07)

Has the hyphen — that tiny punctuational drawbridge linking two otherwise unrelated words — become an endangered species? In the geostrategic sphere, Washington’s famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) ‘hyphenated’ India-Pakistan equation has been dropped from the global political lexicon. Whether or not the nuclear deal with the US (which the Indian Left is doing its best to stymie) comes through or not, Washington is unlikely to once again equate India — whose 60th birthday is causing champagne corks to pop in New York, London and just about everywhere else — with its coeval, Pakistan, which seems inexorably to be sliding into chaos. So in Uncle Sam’s vocabulary regarding the subcontinent, the once ubiquitous hyphen is as dead as the dodo. Unfortunately for it, the hyphen isn’t faring better in the larger sphere of English usage. The latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary — that Michelin guide of what’s cooking semantically in the anglophone world — has dropped the hyphen from no less than 16,000 words. So ‘fig-leaf’ has dropped the ‘fig-leaf’ of the hyphen and become ‘fig leaf’, and ‘pot-belly’ has cut the umbilical cord of the intervening sign and is now officially ‘pot belly’. In other cases, the hyphen has been squeezed out of existence by the merger of previously hyphenated words: ‘pigeon-hole’ has been reborn in the amalgamated avatar of ‘pigeonhole’, and ‘leap-frog’ has turned into ‘leapfrog’.

Perhaps in an increasingly permissive linguistic environment where SMS-ese and other verbal shortcuts have become the order of the day, the hyphen is seen as a quaint relic of the past, rather like the hymen, the sign of female virginity, whose loss is held to be of no great account in a social climate amenable to casual (but safe) sex and live-in (should that now be ‘live in’?) relationships. Will the hyphen survive this all-pervasive onslaught? The answer might lie in the second last word of the last sentence: ‘all-pervasive’, a portmanteau adjective describing the subsequent word, ‘onslaught’. ‘Pot belly’ might be fine. But when you want to describe a person with such a belly you may find you have to have recourse to the adjectival ‘pot-bellied man’. Similarly, a ‘fine-tooth comb’ (a comb with closely designed teeth) is very different from a ‘fine tooth comb’ (presumably a handsome device for combing one’s teeth). While such distinctions matter, the hyphen will remain intacto.