September 19, 2005

Don't you see how late they're reacting?  

1. Ogged seeks input about the relative cheapness of two scenarios; I'm reminded of one evening in Jaipur (that's in India) a few years ago when my travelling companion howled, stomped, and spat on the ground to protest the fact that we'd just been overcharged the equivalent $0.10 by our bicycle rickshaw driver. In fairness to my friend (and in case he's reading!), I think this behavior was the culmination of several days of overcharged negotiation, rather than pure, unadulterated cheapness. But.

2. Like Will Baude, I'm amazed to find that 20 years have passed since the death of Italo Calvino -- not because I ever had any handle on the dates involved, but because I considered his work so fresh and relevant (!) when I read it in the 90s. It's still gorgeous and Important, but also more distant now.

3. Gapers Block links to a fascinating piece about a Chicago area businessman/inventor's efforts to reengineer the screw.

4. And somehow that reimagined screw seems related to this juicy piece on semicolons: there's a quick analysis of what your semicolon use says about your writing style; advice on usage from the evil Fred Barnes, the righteous Michael Kinsley, and any number of other editors and writers; and broad statements about the logical and sociological implications of the semicolon's declining popularity. I have to wonder, though, whether it isn't the double dash that requires more critical attention -- after all, it does seem to get more use these days, and guidelines for its usage are at least as vague as those for the semicolon.

5. Finally, this Metafilter post collects some valiant efforts by hip hop artists to create and remix songs with audio from the Katrina fallout; stALLio! also has some good stuff. If you ask me, the themesong for the whole episode ought to be 911 Is a Joke.

Comments
stAllio!  {September 19, 2005}

formally speaking, there is no such typographical symbol as the "double dash". the actual character is the "em-dash", so named because it should be the same width as an uppercase M. some people have taken to using two hyphens (not dashes) in its place, because there is no em-dash key on the keyboard and thus some plaintext editing environments have no other way of emulating an em-dash. (in html, you make an em-dash with the code —.)

that is, if you want to get anal about it, which i bet you do.

anyway, the preference for em-dashes over semicolons seems symptomatic of the rise of anti-intellectualism. the semicolon is seen as elitist; the dash is more common, more "democratic" even.

i've never thought that the semicolon rules were very vague. the only real problem with them is, as pointed out in the article, that they are primarily optional. you generally don't need to use them unless you are combining multiple clauses into one sentence.

in contrast, the rules for em-dash usage are extremely vague, and there are in fact zero occasions when an em-dash use would be "mandated". even en-dash (the largely-forgotten and almost-completely-useless member of the dash family) has more circumstances where it is "mandated", though outside of the publishing industry i'm not sure anyone uses them ever.

for the longest time, i completely eschewed using em-dashes, as they are pretty much completely unnecessary (in almost all cases, the same functionality can be achieved through use of parentheses). perhaps this was simply a reaction to seeing so many of them (and so few semicolons or parentheses, in comparison) in my professional work. recently i've started to use them on very rare occasions, as their effect is very subtly different than that of parentheses.

paul  {September 19, 2005}

Thanks for this insight -- I actually wondered if you might have something to say on the matter. I love parentheses, but sometimes I'm afraid that the enclosed material will be seen as somehow less important than what's around it, so I tend to use double dashes where I want to have an aside that's of the same importance or on the same level of discourse. I suppose in many cases a comma or semicolon would achieve the same effect.

Do you think double dashes are the appropriate typographical stand in for em-dashes? I switched to using an html code for that em-dash on this site a while back, but different browsers have difficulty reading that so I've gone back to lowest common denominator. Also should one put a space before and after the em-dash? I've seen it used both ways.

stAllio!  {September 19, 2005}

yeah, i don't see a problem with using two hyphens as a stand-in for the em-dash: often real em-dashes are difficult or impossible to use, and the use of two hyphens rather than just one makes it clear that it is supposed to be a dash, not a hyphen.

as for putting spaces around dashes: that's a style issue, as most punctuation debates tend to be. i've been conditioned to use the chicago manual of style, which does not use spaces before or after dashes. other style manuals probably disagree.

paul  {September 19, 2005}

Yeah, I used to do it that way too, but somewhere along the line I changed.

One place I see an awful lot of em-dashes used in an apparently meaningful way is in poetry. I don't really have much insight into what this usage is about, though -- or whether it also incorporates some of that anti-intellectualism you mention.


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