Coworking or Co-working?
We’ve decided not to hyphenate, despite the fact that my family in Wisconsin thinks that without a hyphen it should read Cow Working. I thought it was a cheesehead thing, until John Berry in Seattle concurred. Paul Novitski chimed in with
Cow-working? That’s tame compared to cow-orking. I don’t even want to know what’s involved in orking a cow, although I’ll bet they know in those lonely islands off the northern coast of Scotland. *brr*
Nevertheless, we’ve decided to go sans hyphen, because
- it looks better
- there’s only momentary confusion. Soon, there won’t be.
- we don’t want to have to explain a hyphen in the url (yeah, it’s launchpadcoworking.com with a hyphen — no… a hyphen after the “o”)
Our decision was validated just last week, when Charles McGrath wrote a story about the diminishing role of the hyphen for the New York Times called “Death-Knell. Or Death Knell.” He went so far as to call the hyphen “old fashioned.”
THE Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. ”People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. ”They’re not really sure what they’re for.”
BTW, if you find this friendly dilemma interesting, I highly recommend Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
So, what do you think? Are we safe with the modern, unhyphenated “coworking”?
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2 responses so far ↓
1 John D. Berry // Nov 1, 2007 at 2:43 pm
I’ve always found myself reading “coworkers” as “cow-orkers,” no matter how many times I encounter the word. I figure it’s just that “cow” is more instantly recognizable than “worker” or even “work” – maybe because in human history we domesticated the cow before we domesticated the worker. (We’re still working on the latter.)
McGrath’s article, though, is just silly.
http://johndberry.com/blog/?p=33
John
2 Julie Gomoll // Nov 4, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I agree that hyphens are there for clarification purposes, but hyphens do eventually get dropped when they’ve served their purpose. Think no-one and blue-bird.
Coincidentally, today’s On Language column by the always conservative (politically and linguistically) William Safire included the following paragraph summing up a brief essay on the shoutout/shout-out:
“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)”
We aim to make the hyphen in coworking equally unnecessary :)
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