#HashtagHyphen
Hashtags – once just the name of a symbol – now define social media phrases fronted by the # mark. Hashtags are the strategic tools of social media users who use them to create catchy, innovative and trendsetting phrases. Hashtags link to one another within online social space. They’re a trademark of the digital age and the evolution of language.
The secret of a good hashtag, however, seems to involve compounding. Using Instagram, look what happens when I try out #language:
In linguistics, joining two or more words to make one is called a compound. ‘Languagelearning’ and ‘languagestudy’ are posed as types of compounds when a hashtag features at the front.
Compounding (putting two or more words together) is not new. Old English texts, like Beowulf, evidenced compounds like ‘mead hall’ and ‘sky candle’, but hyphens were inconsistent from writer to writer. At the time, hyphens were mainly used for rhythm or line breaks in English texts, and not part of compounds. Even into Middle English, folks continued to spell and punctuate at their own discretion. (It’s funny how things go back around, right?)
How the Hyphen Secured its Spot
That said, there were very early inklings of the hyphen’s more familiar use in Ancient Greek texts. The Greek grammarian, Dionysius Thrax, was concerned by morphology and the ambiguity of compound words. A treatise was written, The Art of Grammar, where the introduction of a hyphen symbol would show that two words should be read as one unit. Whilst Thrax seemed to be (quite significantly) years ahead of the time, his hyphen proposal wasn’t standardised in the English language until much, much later.
The invention of the printing press in the 1400s and the increased circulation of texts, along with factors like social mobility and educational growth, fuelled the demand for standardised English. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and Noah Webster’s American spelling dictionary played pivotal roles in the English language having consistency. Although Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755), now searchable online, lacks hyphenated words (- I’ve failed to find any at all), writers like Shakespeare certainly used hyphens for clarity in compounds like ‘love-sick’ and ‘lily-livered’ prior to the dictionary being created!
In the 18th century, English underwent standardisation and the hyphen likely became normalised through widespread publication of writing around the same time. We see the use of compounds in the work of Victorian writers: Charlotte Brontë opts for ‘well-nurtured’ in Jane Eyre, and Tennyson writes ‘sleek-wet’ in Lady of Shalott.
Into the 19th century, compound words boomed, serving as adjectives before nouns, as seen in ‘well-known figure’ and ‘mind-set.’ Hyphens became crucial for prefixes like ‘ex’ or ‘self,’ following academic rules, rules that spread through the schooling system and dictionaries. For instance, ‘self-conscious’ superseded ‘selfconscious’.
Also in the early 1900s, a boom in industry, technology and science resulted in the introduction of many new compounds (and other lexical items). Nouns like ‘aircraft’ and ‘telecommunication’ were coined, and modifying adjectives like ‘high-tech’, ‘high-speed’ and ‘steam-powered’ came into common usage. Post World War 2, economic and social changes impacted the language, and by 1980, a consumer culture began to develop. With this came a surge of compounds to describe ‘high-earning’ ‘thirty-somethings’ with the ‘feel-good’ factor!
The ‘Rules’
Then, of course, came the internet. The internet has an undeniably profound impact on language and this is a huge source of fascination/annoyance1 to linguists! The emergence of the internet changed the global language like nothing else before it (and will continue to do so). Thanks to search engines and copious style guides, our friend ‘the hyphen’ initially gained some sure-set rules for usage.
Often, in written formal English, we still apply the hyphen for compound adjectives. This is for readability and sentence clarity. Writing for more formal purposes (i.e. not messages or social media posts), we still see the application of hyphenated compounds in lots of cases e.g. first-hand, time-savvy, and hard-working. (Despite the OED removing those 16,000 words from the dictionary, thousands of hyphenated adjectives still apply, although descriptivists argue that you can really flex this.) We also use hyphens systematically for terms like ‘mother-in-law’ and ‘father-in-law.’
Compound nouns, however, don’t often require hyphenation anymore. ‘Teen-ager’ now looks odd; we just use the noun ‘teenager’. Open compound nouns are comprised of two words that go together with a space in between such as ‘ice cream’ and ‘free fall’. Numerical terms suggest we need (or perhaps want) hyphens. Writing terms like ‘twenty-first century’ or ‘thirty-three’ showcase hyphens for spelled-out numbers. Fractions like ‘one-third’ or ‘three-quarters’ follow suit. Prefixes, like ‘ex’ or ‘self’, remain hyphenated when attached to a root word, because it is systematically agreed that ‘ex-partner’ seems to read better than ‘expartner’ (for now). To compound matters, though, American English tends to avoid hyphens where possible, especially where prefixes are concerned. Yes, you can definitely have an American ‘copilot’.
How the Hyphen is Changing
Yet, language trends bend those rules eventually, and presently, in the world of social media and digital communication, the hyphen faces a decline. In fact, some social media platforms don’t allow hyphens inside hashtags… and others won’t allow you to input punctuation at all! This is sometimes a cause of frustration: why can’t I use the punctuation I like?!
Language evolves every day, and the small-but-mighty hyphen is diminishing, becoming less necessary. John Humphrys projected concern about the loss of hyphens in 2007, citing the Oxford English Dictionary’s removal of hyphens from thousands of words. He questioned the OED who had ‘removed the hyphen from no fewer than 16,000 words.’ ‘Web-site’ became ‘website’ and ‘pot-belly’ became ‘potbelly’.2
Humphrys’ piece was titled ‘I h8 txt msgs’ and he directly blamed the texters of the 2000s for the new, ‘lazy’ way of ‘writing’. Do you remember when email was ‘e-mail’ circa early 2000s? The hyphen was vanishing amid speed, and ease was leading the surge of technological language use.
T-h-e-F-u-t-u-r-e
Language changes like fashion, fitness fads and the latest phones; the popularity and process of compounding has changed. Presently, the hyphen (that society once upheld as a valued part of ‘proper grammar’) is being pushed aside. In the world of digital communication, why add extra punctuation when you don’t need to? And I can’t help but wonder whether the era of hashtags has played a part in pushing out the hyphen.
Whilst the prefix ‘self’ requires hyphenation in writing (self-love, self-esteem, self-confidence…), social media platforms disallow punctuation in hashtags – it’s just not an option. Look at what happens when we hashtag ‘self’ into Instagram:
We could look at the hashtag system as a whole and wonder whether it will change the future compounding of words. When will we drop the hyphen after ‘self’? With hashtags not allowing the use of punctuation, and hashtags sometimes being several words put together, will we eventually stopusingspaces? If hyphens were a way of helping readability, does the removal of them suggest the way that we read is different… and are we going to read differently in the future? Are we going to read at all?!
Social media has likely altered our reading skills significantly, particularly as we’ve become accustomed to reading hashtags. This shift has had a knock-on effect in the way we perceive word spacing. While we can’t solely blame the humble hyphen for this, it is a contributing factor that enhances speed to omit it. Because of hashtags, we are comprehending words devoid of hyphens and spaces.
What will this mean for professional multi-hyphenates such as actor-writer-producer-musician-comedian Donald Glover? The terms ‘artist’ and ‘creative’ are polemical for many, and ‘actor cum writer cum producer cum musician cum comedian’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Moreover, the question remains: are we truly free from confusion and ambiguity in this fast-paced reading environment? #arewereadyforthis?
- delete as appropriate! ↩︎
- I recommend that you avoid ‘pot-belly’ and ‘potbelly’ at all costs anyway. They sound rude to me. If you must use this term, plump for la pancia. It conveys the same meaning but with an elevated, Italian twist! An added bonus is that your interlocutor might not understand and I’ll have saved you from a slap in the face! Thank me later. ↩︎