All Good Things Must Come to an Abbreviation

It's come to my attention that the humble hyphen has become the latest victim of PMAWT. PMAWT is an acronym for an annoying trend that stands for People Messing Around With Things.

As I get older, I have less and less patience for people messing around with things. Perhaps it's a natural reflex that develops with age - like the jolt of hostility I feel towards celebrities who chew gum during television interviews, or the mounting impatience I have with visible thong lines, or my disdain for ink drawings in perfectly good skin.

I recall my first instance of PMAWT indignation. It happened in 1995 when I learned that Candlestick Park in San Francisco had sold its naming rights to the highest bidder and would be changing its name to 3Com Park. I'd never even been to Candlestick Park, although I did drive past it once, but nonetheless I was irked. Since when do baseball parks change their names? I whined. I liked the name Candlestick! (Stomp of foot.)

I was only 38 at the time. Just in my infancy of PMAWT resistance. Much has changed since then - and I haven't liked any of it. Not even the little things.

"What do you mean you no longer offer the smoked trout salad?" I found myself hyper-ventilating to the server at one of our longtime favorite restaurants recently.

And woe be unto thee should you be anywhere within earshot when something BIG changes - like when our city council approved the addition of a Home Depot store on the east side of town a few years back and sold part of our local golf course to a private developer who painted over its billboard and replaced the words "Open To The Public" with "No Trespassing."

I still wax nostalgic whenever I drive past the once-wooded acreage where the bog box store now stands, and sneer at the new two-word golf course greeting. And I still grieve over Midwest Express Airlines dropping the "Express." With the slash of a pen what was once a lilting alliterative Airline name became just another cow in the pasture. I remember back when Midwest Express used to serve bottomless bottles of champagne on every flight and serve in-flight meals on glass dinnerware. Now the only thing they have left to fiddle with is the warm chocolate chip cookies and the leather seats. I sometimes lie awake at nigh wondering which will go first.

What a wonderful world this would be without PMAWT, I often think to myself. Without PMAWT, we'd still have 5-digit zip codes, television sets that weren't set to expire, those warm pinwheel cinnamon rolls McDonald's banished from their menu, and the hyphen

Oh, yes, the innocent hyphen -- which just happens to be one of my favorite punctuation marks, has recently suffered a fatal blow by none other than an even more loathsome scourge, the EMWAT -- short for Egghead Messing Around With Things.

It appears that the editor of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Angus Stevenson, arbitrarily decided to eliminate hyphens from 16,000 words in its sixth edition, published last year.

"People are not confident about how to use hyphens anymore," he said in a recent New York Times article.

Oh contraire, dictionary-meddler. I have been a confident hyphen-user all my life -- a self-assured, pen-wielding, keyboard-tapping, poetry-writing, e e cummings-hating, self-righteous, swash-bucklin', shoot-from-the-hip hyphen-ater since I was knee-high to a typewriter. Please, if you must PMAWT something, PMAWT the apostrophe. No one ever uses it correctly, including me.

Next thing you know someone will come up with the crazy idea to change the original Coca-Cola recipe, or switch all the letters around on the computer keyboard just for the heck of it.

Just to be safe, I'll be stocking up on Coke and stashing all my old keyboards.