I saw this on a restaurant receipt.

Problem:
A hyphen is missing.

Explanation:
I ordered some “take-out” food from a restaurant a couple of evenings ago.

While I was waiting for my order to be prepared, I studied the receipt.

Printed in all capital letters in the middle of it was “TOGO” — spelled T-O-G-O.

Beyond the ridiculousness of using all capital letters given the mixed-case font used throughout the receipt, the designer of the receipt surely did not mean to refer to the African country officially known as the Togolese Republic.

No, the designer was trying to indicate that the order was a take-out order — that the order was “to-go” — spelled T-O-HYPHEN-G-O.

The format of the receipt was more than four characters wide, so the omission of the hyphen between “TO” and “GO” could not be blamed on lack of space.

I believe that the omission of the hyphen is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to omit the hyphen than to include it.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “to-go orders” — using T-O-HYPHEN-G-O — 332,000 matches
• “togo orders” — using T-O-G-O — 3,390 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 97.9-to-1, which is very good.

I still have to wonder whether the restaurant receipt designer has even heard of the country of Togo. Perhaps if he or she had, then the need for the hyphen would have been more obvious.

Solution:
“TO-GO”