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

[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.)