Shed-a-tear-for-the-hyphen

The New York Times reports the impending death of the hyphen, with word that 16,000 hyphens have been eliminated from the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English dictionary.The dictionary is not dropping all hyphens. The ones in certain compounds remain (“well-being,” for example), as do those indicating a word break at the right-hand margin — the use for which this versatile little