More evidence of how new media affects the ways we communicate, down to the very structure of the words we use, as 16,000 words lost their hyphens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary published last week.

According to Reuters, informal means of communication used by websites and honed by text messages and emails (or should that be e-mails?) have rendered the hyphen ‘messy looking’ and ‘old-fashioned’.

So no more press releases with on-line rather than online…