If ya don't use it, ya lose it!

[alexpgp]

The education text I am translating has revealed an curious development (if it can be so called): I had apparently not only reliably forgotten how to break words up into syllables, but in my mind, I had replaced the process of so doing—syllabification—with the word hyphenation (which has to do, inter alia, with dividing words at the end of a line).

I blame every word processing program since my first love—WordStar—for this. I might add I am, frankly, not overly weepy over this lapse, having suffered quite enough, thank you, during my years of pounding the keys of my late father's Smith-Corona manual typewriter.

So, finding myself in a position where I needed to divide a word into syllables, I picked up the English dictionary on my shelf (Shorter Oxford) and found it curious that entries were not displayed in syllabified form. Having rid myself last year of all the other English dictionaries that had been cluttering my shelves since forever, I turned to the Web and in short order found that Merriam-Webster entries are hyphenated.

Cheers...