Is the Internet killing them? This is the problem:
“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” Shorter OED editor Angus Stevenson told Reuters at the time.
It’s part of the continuing breakdown of the educational system. Hyphens are important, primarily for disambiguation of modifiers. There is a difference between a light brown suitcase and a light-brown suitcase. The former is a brown suitcase that doesn’t weigh much, and the latter is a suitcase (of unknown weight) that is light brown. It’s that simple.
I would venture to guess that it isn’t all that simple, since nothing about language conventions ever is … simple. Surely there are differences between English as used in Britain vs US etc.
http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/hyphen
hyphens have other appropriate uses and language itself is considered by many the measure of what is acceptable, never static, always changing.
Things that happen less often are less remembered (especially if never taught in the first place.) People are both creative and forgetful. Consider the under_score. Used in typewriters to underline, but generally not used for that purpose on computers (although there is the convention rarely used that a preceding and following _underscore_ indicates the word should be underlined. Whether done or not the same purpose is accomplished… to emphasize the word.)
In manuscript writing, the typewriter underscore was used to indicate text that was meant to be italicized. Now in most applications people are able to italicize directly.
That being the case I would only use underscore to add _GRATUITOUS_ emphasis.
Didn’t one theory about what really happened in the Zimmerman case hinge on the placement of a hyphen?
“Creepy-a__ cracker” vs “Creepy a__-cracker”?
…. –.- .–. …. . -. …
.- -. -..
.–. . .-. .. — -.. …
.- .-.. — -. .
— .- -.- .
…. .- .-. -..
.-. . .- -.. .. -. –.
.-.-.-
(Hyphens and periods alone make hard reading.)
Man can communicate by punctuation alone, but it’s a pain.
Who needs punctuation for their communication?
Everything that isn’t the thing itself is an encoding of the thing. Some encoding is definitely better than others, but there is an infinity of ways to code any single thing.
I am appalled that the editor of the Shorter OED commits a comma splice, above. I regard that as a much worse problem than avoiding the use of the hyphen.
Agree with your point, though I believe your first example would have a comma: “a light, brown suitcase”.
Another consequence of the typewriter derived ASCII era is that few people distinguish hyphens (Franco-Prussian), n-dashes (1870–1871), and m-dashes—used like a semicolon to separate thoughts. Those few of us remaining who learned TeX grind our teeth every time we see them confused, especially now that Unicode makes it easy to get it right.
The Atlantic article uses the typewriter convention of “–” where an em-dash is called for.