From a Los Angeles Times obit by Thomas Curwen headlined “Henry Fuhrmann, Times editor and ‘word nerd’ who fought for fairness in grammar, dies”:

No one had really paid too much attention to the hyphen. In matters of race and heritage — as in “African-Americans” or “Italian-Americans” — it was easily overlooked, an innocuous piece of punctuation that seemed to make sense.

Henry Fuhrmann thought otherwise. Journalist and self-described word nerd, Fuhrmann saw in the simple construction an unnecessary and derogative diminution of American identities and understood that no battle was too small in the fight for clarity, precision and fairness.