Brevity. It’s something that is increasingly valued in a society with a rapidly shrinking attention span. If you can’t express what you want to say in 140 characters or less, I’m not that interested in what you have to say. And saving that one space seems to be worth some added ambiguity.
The idea for today’s post came from an earlier Grammar 101 entry where we discussed how the Internet changed everything. For many terms, we moved from having two separate words to having a hyphenated term to removing the separation altogether.
Take “marketplace,” as an example. It may have been true at one point that it was written as “market place.” Quite literally, this would indicate to you that this was the place with the market. We all accept “marketplace” as a perfectly normal “compound” word and, personally, I have no issue with it. The same can be said about “girlfriend,” which may have once been written as “girl friend.”
In the last few years, though, I’ve noticed an increase in the use of “videogame” as a single word. Growing up, I’ve always known and written it as two words: video game. I never hyphenated it and I never thought to combine them. In much the same way, while I do use terms like smartphone (and not smart phone), I still disagree with the use of cellphone (instead of cell phone). I can’t say for sure what is more “correct” or “accepted” in today’s culture, but I do see a definite shift toward increased simplicity. And that means combining words.
Will it only be a matter of time before we use compound words like computergame, highdefinition, and coffeemug? I hope not.
I agree with the advent of Twitter a lot of words are being compressed into compound words that they shouldn’t be. While I prefer smartphone as one word, the term smart and phone together aren’t right. It isn’t a “smart” phone, it’s a phone attached to a computer.