.MaryNorrisTNY writes about the history of the hyphen—and The New Yorker’s most unpopular application of the mark.
Mahdavi, an Iranian-American , was a dean at Arizona State University when she tackled this project, as part of a series for Bloomsbury Academic called Object Lessons, “about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” The invention of the hyphen has been credited to Dionysius Thrax, a Greek grammarian who worked at the Library of Alexandria in the second century B.C. Mahdavi writes, “The elegant, sublinear bow-shaped U-hyphen . . . was used to fuse words and highlight words that belonged together.
In modern times, the hyphen has sown controversy. Mahdavi tells the story of how Teddy Roosevelt, in his outrage at losing the Presidency to Woodrow Wilson, in 1912, appealed to Americans’ xenophobia. He was an “anti-hyphenate.” Mahdavi writes, “Referring to the hyphen between the name of an ethnicity and the word ‘American,’ hyphenism and hyphenated Americanism was seen as a potentially fracturing and divisive force in an America on the brink of war.
Whereas Mahdavi has chosen to embrace the hyphen, others have rejected it. In 2019, the Associated Press dropped the hyphen from such terms as “German American” and “Chinese American,” gladdening the heart of Henry Fuhrmann, formerly a copy editor for the Los AngelesThe New Yorker
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