In praise of em-dashes

[randy_byers]

My response to the recent screed against em-dashes is that I love em-dashes so much that half my love for silent movies is for the frequent use of double em-dashes in the intertitles:

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I've not seen that before (not being terribly familiar with silent movies*) but it's interesting that the double dash is filling the role of a colon and the single on that of a semi-colon. To me, it reads more naturally than if there were two single em-dashes.

(*I think the last one I saw was the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's splendid dramatisation of The Call of Cthulhu.)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how consistent the use of double em-dashes as a colon is. I actually had some trouble finding a good example of the double em-dash via Google, and I couldn't find any from movies I've actually seen. But silent film intertitles are the only place I've run across double em-dashes, and I'm curious how they came to be used. I really do find them beautiful.

And yes, the silent Call of Cthulhu is wonderful. The HPLHS' next film, The Whisperer in Darkness, is close to being finished, from what I've heard.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

MM-dashes!

The whole screed-y thing about using too many em-dashes is more properly a screed against people who use too many of them, and doesn't seem to me to touch on the humble horizontal marks at all.

The real thing to go after would be hillbilly emo poets who use ellipses in place of every other bit of punctuation. I think it's in an issue of Highway Evangelist that I found at a truck stop that someone wrote a pathetic poem (in more than one way) about some horribly mistreated child, who of course dies, and every dozen words would have at least two ellipses in them somewhere. The effect was of someone gasping out the words, perhaps racked by spasms of tears, or maybe barfing at the naked bathos of the verses.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

There's no such thing as too many em-dashes!

However, I'm with you on excess ellipses ...

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Ellipses... are misused to indicate... thoughtfulness....

But... the effect on me... is of someone nodding off... between thoughts...

Worse yet.. is when someone indicates the length of the pause......... with an apparently.. random number...... of dots...................

*splorfle*

Wait, what? I was awake!

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I find the use of an ellipsis to indicate a pause in speech overused.
I applaud the use of the ellipsis used correctly to indicate words removed from a quote or similar. Especially if an actual ellipsis character is used, rather than three periods. Editing and teaching have apparently turned me into quite the typography and punctuation pedant!

[johnnyeponymous.livejournal.com]

I still have no idea what an em-dash is.
Chris

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's U+2014 (8212), of course!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

More seriously, from my layman's perspective an em-dash is a slightly longer dash than the typical dash or hyphen, which I think is also called an en-dash. It's typically used in pairs in the middle of a sentence to set off a sentence fragment that's a digression or elaboration outside the main point of the sentence.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

technically, a hyphen is shorter than an en-dash, but even less people use en-dashes correctly than use em-dashes correctly. Ideally a minus sign is different again, though it isn't always.
An em-dash is so called because it is generally about the width of a letter M, which is generally the widest letter, and the en-dash is about the width of a letter N, so an em-dash is usually about twice the width of an en-dash.
As usual, wikipedia contains far more than most of us would wish to know http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's particularly interesting that different countries use em-dashes and en-dashes for the same purpose, although then there's also the all-important question of spaces around the dash. I prefer spaces even with em-dashes. No, I don't know why! I probably shouldn't even have a preference, considering my low level of knowledge on the subject.

[janetl.livejournal.com]

I am very prone to using the mdash and parentheses, because I can't finish a thought but must dash off in another direction!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you, sister.

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

I like em dashes. So there.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

We should form a club. I even have a T-shirt for it.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'm especially fond of Joseph Moxon's _Mechanic Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing_ (1683-4), as revised and reprinted by the Oxford University Press (1958).

This work makes it clear that most of our "pointing" (punctuation) was developed by printers and proof-readers to indicate the length of pauses that seem to meke the best sense when reading text aloud, and originally was, to put it bluntly, arbitrary and artificial, being only remotely related to grammatical construction. So yes, the whole field is highly subjective. As new mediums have been introduced -- lead type, the mechanical typewriter, electronic fomats -- changes have taken place, & will continue to do so, giving people who like to quibble much opportunity to indulge in this practice, and in pontification.

As a member of The Typewriter Generation, I interpret the ordinary dash (also serving as a hyphen or a minus sign) as being an en-dash, so two are used to create an em-dash (with a blank space on either side) as indicating a longish pause to set off a word or phrase that isn't quite remote enough from the context to deserve the use of the parenthesis. I'd try not to use this in Formal Writing... but then, I've not done any really Formal Writing in many decades.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Brilliant historical information there, Don. Your comment about The Typewriter Generation is an interesting one, and that's probably the reason I think of the hyphen/minus/en-dash as all the same as well -- because that's all there was on the keyboard, one dash fits all.

I can't remember when I arrived at the em-dash, and the use of two typewriter-dashes to represent them. I'd have to check my old college papers to see if I used em-dashes when I still used a typewriter. I do remember that at some point years after I switched to PCs I figured out how to program a key-combination in Word that produced an actual em-dash. A thrilling discovery! (And come to think of it, I still need to do that on my spanking new PC.)