Yes, if the lexicographers are to be believed. The latest revision of the Oxford English Dictionary eschews them, dumping more than 16,000 examples (including the crucial “fig-leaf”) for their compound equivalents (“figleaf”). The reason? “Our world of fast keying and quick edits onscreen has largely given up searching for the hyphen.”

The poets won’t like it, or so one is first led to think. How could Hopkins have praised “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow” without a hyphen? In fact, the jury is still out on hyphens in poetry.

As far as capriciousness goes, many early poets’ work varies hyphenation in different versions of the same text.

Nor do style guides agree on the hyphen. Fowler’s Modern English Usage makes a detailed study, then admits “usage is so variable as to be better named caprice”.

Another very popular style book (in the realm of ‘style-books’, I might add) says: “If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.” Sir Ernest Gowers, author of The Complete Plain Words, replies: “I have no intention of taking hyphens seriously.” So it doesn’t matter if they are being used less frequently?

It does matter if the-then ubiquitous hyphens are fast disappearing, but more because of politics than poetry or punctuation. Arab-Americans, for example, might set much store by them at the moment, just as other hyphenated Americans did when President Woodrow Wilson disparaged them back in his 1919 address: “I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic.”

Actually, the great thing about American society is that it compounds and separates at the same time, making both the universal and exceptional case. That’s also the virtue of the term-cleaving hyphen.

Maybe its death onscreen is really saying something about the American empire and its provinces in ultra-modern world of cyberspace.

Perhaps this is a moment anthropologists of the future, looking down like hungry falcons on the blue-bleak embers of our world, will identify as a tipping point. Or tipping-point.