Ridiculous response, no reply necessary.
Read your blue book.
Then bother why for the grammar correct wen every bodies nowings wut you meens any ways?
Translation: How lazy can a person possibly be to decline to hit a key twice instead of just once? There’s a difference between informality on a message board, including the use of common colloquialisms, and “just plain wrong”. It’s exactly analogous to the careless use of bad grammar – it makes the text harder to read, even if ever so slightly. A hyphen is not a sentence break, and pressing the hyphen key twice instead of once is not a calamitous hardship.
If THIS isn’t the most nit-pickiest, pedantic discussion of using punctuation anyone has ever read, I’ll eat my hat.
…
There is absolutely zero difference in ease of reading between - and – in message board posting. Zero.
The whole em vs en dash vs hyphen has become the equivalent of ‘proper manners’, i.e. weird behaviours that are used to ridicule and exclude. It’s up there with double spacing after a full stop. These rules belong in the distant past when words were impressed on a page via metal stamps but are nonsense today. And I say this as someone who’s been writing for a living for more than twenty years. Readers don’t care, readers uses electronic devices even less so.
Beck, this is talk in trade for copy editors.
To give you an example, my company’s brand logo comprises the names of two companies that merged, AICPA & CIMA. The “&” part is crucial. It has taken a deeper meaning than just an abbreviated form of “and.” So much so, we don’t use “&” in text if it’s not part of a title. Yes, that kind of policy does have rippling financial effects.
We also recently instated the Oxford comma.
We use the en dash for minus signs. The em dash is used for time periods, like 1—3pm, with no spaces. Since we’re an international company, we use single quotes for areas covered by our UK counterparts, and we put hard stops (periods) outside of the end quote.
Soooooo many things the average Joe wouldn’t care about, but which are the nails of our empire.
Exactly. Holdovers from typesetting and typewriting that had morphed into class identifiers. Now morphing even further into signifiers of very humanity, or the lack thereof.
“But — I’m human!” cried the last nobles of EmDash, as the proles branded them with the scarlet AI…
Aside - hope you’re keeping well!
So to sum up: we now have so few trolls on the board that we are forced to talk about em-dashes and Pia Zadora instead?
I guess it is a good thing, but damn, such a weirdly boring hijack of the troll thread. I give up.
Someone’s coming off real bad in this exchange, that’s for sure.
Legalsplaining to a lawyer, LOL.
And then when contradicted, “Well then you should know better.”
No matter what the circumstances or rationality or just plain good manners would indicate, when contradicted, double down. Or at least that seems to be the rule for most folks.
Really I couldn’t give a horse’s meep.
All’s good.
Y’all are right. It’s a silly matter. I apologize.
OK, I guess I’m using n dashes also, at least some of the time. And not usually noticing any difference between an m and an n dash, whether I’m writing it or reading it.
And I produce them differently on the ipad touch keyboard than on the desktop’s.
I’ve been known to use n-dashes as parenthetical brackets when I felt that actual parentheses interrupted the flow of the sentence too much.
Typographically, there are seven types of dashes. The en dash, the em dash, the quotation dash, the figure dash, the hyphen, the minus sign, and the hyphen-minus.
See them in captivity on pp. 145-6, Capter 8 in Shady Characters by Keith Houston.
Exceptionally fun book, a history of more hairsplitting, nitpickery, crankiness, cranks, shifting definitions, pedantry, and complicated solutions to trivial problems than in all million pages of the Dope.
I know this thread is getting rather derailed but I can’t let this nonsense stand. This is exactly the same inane argument that’s used against those who plead for some modicum of grammatical correctness in the way people write, accusing them of “classism”. No, it’s all about clarity. Whether it’s clarity in how you organize your thoughts, how you compose your sentences, or how you punctuate them, conforming to established standards helps you communicate more clearly. Furthermore, adhering to standards, whether linguistic or typographical, is a courtesy to your reader, as opposed to dumping out a careless incoherent stream of consciousness as often seen on the internet.
Bullshit. This is obviously false since I certainly care, and I couldn’t be the only one in the world who does. In fact I would suggest that the invention and popularity of e-readers is evidence that many people do care about the aesthetics of typography. Many read e-books on their phones or tablets, but many, like myself, appreciate the way that e-ink technology closely mimics the printed page. In fact one of the reasons I returned an early Kindle in exchange for an upgraded model is that the better one had a more appealing traditional print-like font.
Traditional metal movable type may not be used much any more, but the aesthetics of typography is still very much alive.