Instead of being called Wal-Mart, it’s now Walmart. No more dash—but wait—that’s not a dash! It’s a hyphen. Grammarly explains:
A hyphen (-) is a punctuation mark that’s used to join words or parts of words. It’s not interchangeable with other types of dashes.
A dash is longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. The most common types of dashes are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).
So Walmart is dropping the hyphen. That doesn’t sound as cool as “drops the dash”. How about these:
- Heel the hyphen.
- Halt the hyphen.
- Hold the hyphen.
Hmmm, nope. Not as snappy as down with the dash. Ah well.
What other words lost their hyphen?
e-mail comes to mind. Reuters reports that 16,000 words lost their hyphen. They list some examples of formerly hyphenated words unified in one:
- bumblebee
- chickpea
- crybaby
- leapfrog
- logjam
- lowlife
- pigeonhole
- touchline
- waterborne
That’s nine examples. What about the other 15,991 words? I really want to see the complete exhaustive list of 16,000 words that lost their hyphen.
What if you printed a book with all 16,000 words. How much money would you save on not printing that extra piece of toner between each word? How much toner and ink is saved all-time worldwide by not printing the hyphen? I’d love to know.
Now let’s remove it from T-shirt, X-ray, e-commerce and e-book.
And thanks to Steve Tanner for the snappy headline! It’s from his tweet where I first heard this bit of news.
