Look anywhere in newspapers, magazines and journals and you will soon find that there is universal disagreement in the manner in which bio-fuel is written down. The four common variations seen in the title of this article are examples of this universal drift towards grammatical confusion; there are others.

Shock horror; even within the same newspapers there seems to be enormous variation with editors flinging capitals in here and there for no other reason it seems to me than decoration. Just to recap editor colleagues: In the past, before even steam trains existed, long ago when scribes used feathers; in the dark ages of black and white print-only; then it was correct to place all nouns in capitals. Now there is a distinction between a common noun (person, place or thing) and a proper noun (a unique item). Bio-fuel is not unique (it is a collective noun; a collection of many types of fuel) therefore should be in capitals only when placed at the beginning of a sentence; like this one. When one talks about bio-fuel in the middle of a sentence it is therefore in lowercase.

Now I know we all like to blame the confusion on the Americans; they after all had to invent their own version of the English language, presumably because the founding fathers couldn't spell. But the Americans' are as confused as the British.

Dictionaries seem to be as much of the source of the problem as its cure; all dictionaries will allow bio-fuel, but only some biofuel. From the dictionary point of view bio-fuel is by far the most acceptable variation but this as we know is a hyphenated combination of the word bio and fuel.

To confuse matters further; bio-fuel in biology is often quoted in textbooks as being the fuel needed to sustain the body. It would make sense, as the word becomes more and more synonymous with fuel for engines, to accept biofuel to be the word used exclusively for this.

Oh dear! What a mess we are in? Where do I go from here?
I rather like the new version biofuel even though it is not an acceptable word in my own spelling-check dictionaries. I would use it although I know I will be chastised by the shallow brethren of editors; cut-throat they are, baying for blood and for my job. But biofuel is the word of the future and it is in the Oxford English Dictionary.

What is universally true is that one shouldn't change throughout a single publication; what frustrates me is that my fellow writers don't seem to agree! So for the moment I will encourage writers to use bio-fuel and lay down my soul, admit defeat and shrug my head. The power of the spellcheck remains all powerful!

I think the sticklers for spelling should accept either biofuel or bio-fuel as long as the writer is consistent and only uses capitals at the beginning of a sentence.