“Well,” said a friend of mine, with a laugh, “the New York Times thinks hyphens are old-fashioned.”
My god, what in inordinately stupid article! Hyphens exist for clarity. All punctuation exists to make it possible to read our words right the first time through, not have to puzzle over them. (That’s why we have spaces between words, too. We didn’t always.) There’s no virtue in less or more punctuation; only in exactly the right punctuation to communicate clearly.
Charles McGrath, who ought to know better, is just twittering on about fashion.
And I won’t even get into the usefulness of hyphens in typography.
I have long campaigned against the hyphen. Not the complete elimination of the hyphen — as you note, it is sometimes necessary for clarity — but the restriction of its use to instances when it is truly required. The copy editing rules for hyphens are mostly a case of needless regularizing, inconsistently sensible; I spend an annoying out of my copy editing time on hyphens, because damned few writers are thoroughly conversant with any style book’s hyphen rules (and I don’t blame them). The alternative is simply to make judgment calls case by case, which would result in far fewer hyphens and no less sense (or art).
“Eventually, hyphens outlive their usefulness, though, right?” Mostly, yes. But there are occasional words where the need for a hyphen never goes away – re-form vs. reform, for instance. When you mean “form again,” you simply have to include the hyphen; otherwise, everyone will think first of reform, which is something entirely different.
Eventually, hyphens outlive their usefulness, though, right? We no longer type “no-one” or “to-day”. I have no interest in doing away with hyphens, but I do think they’re overused. Even curmudgeonly William Safire commented today in his On Language column in the NYT:
“But don’t take my word for it; I was a college dropout. (That smarmy humility is a cop-out, a word not old enough to have lost its hyphen.)”
Hopefully, LaunchPad Coworking will be popular enough that clarity won’t be an issue for long :)