Linguistic Change Again

I mentioned this topic a while back, but this comic brought it up, so I thought I’d do a repeat. First the comic (The Barn):

Okay. The tendency in English is to go from a common pair of words to the same pair hyphenated (this step sometimes gets skipped), and finally to a compound word. It looks like seat belt is making that trip. Writing seatbelt already feels correct, though it’s not in my spell checker yet. Recently Microsoft, in their style guide, changed web site to website. Email used to be e-mail. Pickup truck used to be pick-up truck. Go back a little farther, and today used to be to-day. And today I ran into a new one. Quoting my favorite blogger, Mike Peterson, in Comic Strip of the Day,

…I remember when Ross Perot chose former POW Admiral James Stockdale as his runningmate in 1992, setting up an honorable man for a disastrous face plant.

“Runningmate” is new to me.

Is it a “backup” or a “back-up”? (If you want the verb, it’s back up.) How about “onboard instrument” or “on-board instrument”?  From the October 2016 Scientific American: “present-day abundance,” “empty-handed detection efforts,” “double-edged sword,” “next-generation detectors,” and “so-called WIMP miracle” are still correctly hyphenated. But these are also correct: “the downside is that…,” “upgraded versions,” “a playground,” but what about “dark horse candidate”? Shouldn’t that be hyphenated?

So if you’re in doubt about whether a pair of words should be separate or together, feel somewhat free to combine them. That’s what’s likely to happen eventually anyway.

Which leads to a joke of sorts. German is older than English, and it’s had more time to make compounds; in fact they’re famous for it. The other day, in conversation with a German friend, we ran into this word:

Apfelstreuselkuchenblasenstechergewerkschaftshauptsekretär.

Figure that one out!