John North Editor & Publisher

As the world’s economy appears on the verge of collapse, war between Israel and Iran seems imminent and oil prices skyrocket out of control (taking the cost of living into the stratosphere with them), there’s even more troubling news.

Wal-Mart — make that the new, hyphen-free Walmart — is trumpeting a redesigned logo that underlines the decline of the English language.

The new logo features new color and totally different typography, as well as a starburst, in an effort — reportedly, at least — to make the retail giant look more soft and modernized.

Walmart Stores Inc. — not just the world’s largest private retailer, but also its largest company — announced on June 29 that this fall it will begin replacing logos on the front of its U.S. stores with the new design.

Aside from the ridiculous amount of time and money presumably spent on the new logo project, which probably was outsourced to China or India anyway, the project strikes me as a colossal waste.

In following a societal trend of putting punctuation marks on the chopping block, as noted recently in The Wall Street Journal, the new look would replace the hyphen in the company’s name, now shown as a star, in its more than 3,600 U.S. stores.

For the few of us who still care about communicating precisely through the English language, punctation marks and all, the hyphen’s removal by Walmart confirms my concerns that a dumbed-down America doesn’t understand how to use hyphens any better than it understands how to use turn signals. No doubt secret corporate memos will someday reveal that the decades-long use of the star in previous logos was intended as a loss leader, gradually accustoming Walmart shoppers to downsized, de-hyphenated logo product.

A while back, I wrote about the Apostrophe Protection Society and its tireless efforts to protect the downtrodden — and increasingly rare — apostrophe. Now it looks like the APS needs to expand to fight for the hapless hyphens, which also are joining the list of endangered species of the grammatical kind. Just watch: Soon we’ll be writing “Walmarts,” with no apostrophe, as we do “Ingles.” (The locally based supermarket chain, founded by the Ingle family, axed its apostophe years ago.)

Missouri is another place where the hyphen is in danger of extinction. “The Show-Me State,” which requires that slogan on all license plates, has stopped showing the hyphen on the plates now rolling ungrammatically off the presses. Many Missourian language-lovers have expressed outrage that there is no state requirement for inclusion of the hyphen.

There are excellent reasons to use the hyphen, apostrophe, comma and other punctuation marks. For instance, is “a high school student” someone attending secondary school, or a pupil puffing a joint? In this case, putting the hyphen in could keep the kid out of jail.

Is Walmart changing and simplifying its logo merely to gain attention and promote business? Or is it because the chain’s image is so poor among consumers that it needs to soften and modernize it?

Either way, this Goliath seems always to be putting style over substance, to the point there is no longer any substance.

Given the slide toward stupification in U.S. society, I am expecting an even more stripped-down logo to roll out in a few years that just says, “wals,” in all-lower-case letters — enabling those who can’t grasp the rules of capitalization to feel comfortable, too.

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John North, publisher and editor of the Daily Planet, may be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it