A few years ago I posted about the other, rarer mystery, the one meaning ‘craft, art; trade, profession, calling’ and deriving from post-classical Latin misterium ‘duty, office, service,’ altered from classical Latin ministerium by confusion with mystērium ‘mystery’ (in the usual sense’); at DC Blog I just found a beautiful example of its use in this discussion of the history of to-day, to-night, and to-morrow (which lost their hyphens around a century ago):
The steady disappearance of the usage in the 20th century was influenced by Fowler, who in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage comes out against it: ‘The lingering of the hyphen, which is still usual after the to of these words, is a very singular piece of conservatism’. He blames printers for its retention, in a typical piece of Fowlerish irony: ‘it is probably true that few people in writing ever dream of inserting the hyphen, its omission being corrected every time by whose who profess the mystery of printing.’
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