Mea Culpa: A bit of lighthearted fun with hyphens

We had “lighthearted fun” and “light-hearted fun” in our pages this week, which tells you two things. One is that some words cling to each other. Hypocrisy, for example, is often breathtaking, while inextricably seems to be inextricably linked with linked. There are many kinds of fun, but the heavy-hearted variety seems rather rare.

The other is that we are inconsistent with our hyphens. Of course we are. Benjamin Dreyer, in his excellent Dreyer’s English, points out that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition, contains entries consecutively for “light-hearted” and “lighthearted”. He comments: “Which tells you pretty much everything you want to know about the use of hyphens, which is to say: It doesn’t make much sense, does it.”

He says in a footnote – I love books with good footnotes – that the Oxford English Dictionary hyphenates light-hearted, but “on the same page heartbreaking appears as one word, while heart-rending and heart-stopping both have hyphens”.

As Dreyer says, this is how language changes. Short cut evolved via short-cut into shortcut. Baby-sit became babysit. E-mail became email. (He comments in another footnote: “I still feel a pang of remorse over my acquiescence to ‘email’ – doesn’t ‘e-mail’ look better and, more important, look like what it sounds like? But ‘email’ was happening whether I liked it or not, and, as in so many things, one can be either on the bus or under the bus.”)

None of this matters much, but to the extent that it does, we should try to be consistent. For the record, The Independent’s style is “lighthearted” and our rule – “more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule”, as Captain Barbossa might say – is to do away with hyphens where possible.

By no we meant yes: We were tripped up by a common confusion recently, when we wrote about “the worldview proscribed by Isis’s ideology”. (Worldview is another word that was two words, then hyphenated and is now one.) Thanks to Chris King for pointing out that we meant “prescribed”, which means “recommended with authority”, whereas “proscribed” means “banned”, which is more or less the opposite.

Boris, insincere? Another reader, Richard Hanson-James, said we had misused “fulsome” in an article about our new prime minister: “Boris admitted later that he could have been more fulsome in his defence of Darroch.” My ruling is that fulsome is used here as an intense form of full, which was its original meaning.

Some people insist that its correct meaning is “excessive and insincere”. It is worth knowing that this is a view held by a number of readers, and this is a good reason for avoiding the use of an unnecessary word, but our use of it was not wrong.

Mr Hanson-James is on stronger ground, however, in questioning whether we should be referring to Mr Johnson as “Boris”. I think it is up to the writers of comment articles what they want to call him, but they should be aware that it might imply what Mr Hanson-James calls “an unwise familiarity”.