Lose the hyphen

For most people, of course — including many of the impassioned commenters — the ruling doesn’t matter at all. What the AP means by “style” has nothing to do with soaring prose or platform sandals. AP style is just a guide to the fine points of editing for AP employees and subscribers — a compilation of preferences in matters of spelling, punctuation, and usage that have more than one right answer.

Many news outlets follow AP’s guidelines, which are published in book form and online, so its decisions do make a difference. But nobody’s bound to follow them: At the Globe and The New York Times, which have their own style guides, e-mail is keeping its hyphen (for now). And in everyday life, we can still hyphenate as quirkily as we like.

So why the heated reactions to the e-mail decision? Like much language change, a shift in AP style seems to say something about who we are and what we value as a culture. That may be an illusion, but we can’t resist inventing explanations for our language preferences. If you’ve always used the serial comma — “red, white, and blue” — its absence can look slipshod and lazy. If you were taught the more streamlined AP style — “red, white and blue” — the extra comma may seem fussy and pretentious.

And when a style change reflects obvious cultural trends, it’s natural for language traditionalists to see it as a threat to Literacy In Our Time. There was no rebellion when the Chicago Manual of Style — the leading guide for scholarly books — changed “Taylor and Elm Streets” to “Taylor and Elm streets,” lower-casing “streets,” and then changed it back again in a later edition. But allowing a sentence to start with a lower-case letter, as Chicago now does — “iPods are indispensable,” “eBay is floundering” — seems like more than a style decision; it’s a concession to branding fashion.