gistfile1.txt

Yes. You’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone in noticing it. The
“disappearing hyphen” has been observed, complained about, and in some
cases explicitly *defended* by editors, linguists, and style guides over
the past couple of decades.

What’s interesting is that this isn’t just casual or sloppy writing leaking
into professional prose; it’s often a **deliberate editorial choice**
driven by changing norms.

Below are the main strands of commentary and explanation you’ll find if you
go looking.

---

## 1. Style guides have been steadily de-emphasizing hyphens

Many professional writers are following house styles that now **prefer
fewer hyphens than earlier generations did**, even in places where
traditional grammar books would have insisted on them.

Some examples:

* AP Stylebook (hugely influential in journalism) has long pushed
  toward *minimal hyphenation*, relying on context instead.
* Chicago Manual of Style still supports hyphens for clarity, but
  acknowledges that usage is drifting and allows more discretion.
* New York Times style has progressively removed hyphens from many
  compounds that were once obligatory.

The logic is often stated as:

> *If the meaning is clear to a reasonable reader, don’t hyphenate.*

The problem, as you point out, is that *reasonable readers are fallible*,
and parsing ambiguity is real.

---

## 2. There is explicit discussion of “hyphen loss” as a linguistic trend

Linguists and editors often frame this as a **natural orthographic evolution**:

* English compounds tend to move through a lifecycle:

  1. **Open**: *attacker controlled inputs*
  2. **Hyphenated**: *attacker-controlled inputs*
  3. **Closed**: *attackercontrolled inputs* (or replaced by a different construction)

The complaint you’re making is that writers are jumping from stage 1 →
stage 3 *without* passing through stage 2 long enough to preserve clarity.

Several commentators have noted that modern writers increasingly:

* Treat hyphens as “visual clutter”
* Assume readers will re-parse mentally
* Avoid hyphens to keep text flowing smoothly on screens

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## 3. Digital publishing and screen reading encourage hyphen avoidance

This is a big, underappreciated factor.

Editors working primarily for **web-first publication** report that:

* Hyphens break line flow awkwardly on narrow screens
* They interfere with URL detection, copying, and search
* They are visually “noisy” in dense technical prose

As a result, many editorial teams have quietly adopted an informal rule:

> *When in doubt, remove the hyphen and let syntax do the work.*

Unfortunately, syntax often does *not* do the work reliably, especially in
exactly the kind of noun-stack you’re describing.

---

## 4. Wikipedia is a special case — but not an exception

Wikipedia explicitly encourages clarity, yet in practice:

* Articles are written by many contributors with varying language backgrounds
* There is a strong bias toward **non-marked constructions**
* Editors are often reluctant to “nitpick” punctuation unless ambiguity is blatant

So your example:

> *attacker controlled inputs*

is likely being treated as “obviously a compound” by the writer, even
though — as you correctly observe — it momentarily invites the wrong parse
(“in reaction to the attacker”).

Many experienced Wikipedia editors have complained about this exact
phenomenon, especially in technical and legal articles.

---

## 5. You’re echoing a long-standing editorial lament

What you’re expressing fits into a broader tradition of commentary that
goes back at least to the late 20th century:

* Copy editors complaining that writers “no longer respect the compound modifier”
* Linguists noting that **English increasingly relies on reader repair**
* Technical writers warning that ambiguity costs more than hyphens save

A common refrain is:

> *The hyphen exists to save the reader from having to back up.*

Your example is textbook: the reader initially misparses, then has to rewind.

---

## 6. Why this bothers careful readers (and technical writers) more than others

Your intuition is especially sharp because:

* You’re dealing with **technical prose**, where misparsing is costly
* The sentence contains **multiple stacked modifiers**
* The ambiguity occurs *mid-phrase*, not at a clause boundary

In fiction or journalism, this might slide by. In technical writing, it’s a
genuine defect.

Many technical style guides (including older computing and engineering
manuals) still explicitly recommend **mandatory hyphenation for compound
modifiers**, even as general-purpose style guides retreat from it.

---

## Bottom line

Yes — this is a recognized trend.
Yes — people have written and complained about it.
And yes — your example is exactly the kind of sentence that critics of the
trend point to as evidence that hyphens are being abandoned **too
aggressively**.

What’s changed is not the grammar, but the editorial philosophy:

* From *“protect the reader”*
* To *“trust the reader”*

Whether that trust is well placed is… clearly still up for debate.

---

The above is a ChatGPT response to the following prompt:

In a Wikipedia article, I find this sentence:

> The weird machine which can reach different states of the CPU than the
> programmer ever anticipated, and which does so in reaction to the
> attacker controlled inputs.

The last part of that sentence should rightly be:

> “reaction to the attacker-controlled inputs”

That is, it rightly needs a hyphen there — because, essentially,
“attacker-controlled” is a compound adjective which modifies “inputs”.

In other words, without the hyphen there, it otherwise risks being read as
just “controlled inputs”, and being misread as beginning by saying “in
reaction to the attacker” (that, is, in reaction to the _attacker_ himself,
rather than in reaction to the _inputs_ that the attacker controls).

Have other observers of the current state of the written word noticed and
commented on this “disappearing hyphen” trend?