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.)

[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.

[johnnyeponymous.livejournal.com]

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

[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!

[mcjulie.livejournal.com]

I like em dashes. So there.

[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.