Semantics

I was reading a ZDNET post about The Question no one is asking about pre-texting and it occcurred to me, why would anyone spell the word with a hyphen? Has vernacular English so screwed up the language that someone who writes (and proofreads) professionally would not realize that the root of pretexting is pretext? Do they think that somehow it involves "texting" someone in advance? What the heck would that mean anyway?

It reminds me of the people who get upset over words like niggardly or perverse even when they are used properly in an inoffensive way. Then again, it's nothing new. This made me recall the 1950 Pepper-Smathers primary in Florida and the following links which may or may not make any sense to you:
George Smathers
Claude Pepper
Pepper Smathers from google
Bush 41 = Smathers (this is dumb - and even dumber 15 years later)
Kerry = neo-Smathers - also dumb
Rove = Smathers (what is this, some kind of perverse Godwin's Law)? (probably an improper use of perverse, but I couldn't resist)
"pre-texting" search
pretexting search

Probably poor use of the word dumb above, too. I guess I have that out of my system now.