Item: The estimable Jesse Sheidlower, whose The F Word deserves your close attention, has an essay at Slate.com about the difficulties of including and properly defining sexual terms in the dictionary.
If you like vulgar words — and who among us is afraid to admit it? — he offers plenty. (Though nothing quite as graphic as the bovine flatulence that Language Log is celebrating.)
Item: It is probably even more difficult to determine what should go into a book of quotations. The Oxford University Press blog (Caution, reader: this is a promotional article) recently commented on the inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations of a remark by Paris Hilton: “Dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in.”
I have not solicited her views on the bow tie.
Item: Jag Bhalla, an amateur idiomologist and author of I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, a collection of idioms from ten languages, writes at the National Post of Canada about his addiction to language and his search for exotic idioms.
The title of his book is a translation of a Russian expression equivalent to the English idiom I’m not pulling your leg. Presumably the English would sound comically exotic to a Russian.
Item: Adrienne Carlson has sent me a link to “75 Awesome Games, Tools, and Links for Word Lovers” at the Accredited Online Degrees site. I can’t vouch for the awesomeness of all 75 entries, but several of them look as if they might assist you in wasting time at work.
Item: There is still time to for you to put a handful of votes in the ballot box for this blog at The Sun’s Mobbies competition. (See link at upper right corner.)
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Here comes the judge
Sharon Eliza Nichols boasts that she has more than 300,000 members on her Facebook group, I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar, and these valiant battlers against the forces of darkness have submitted more than 7,000 photos in judgment.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
Now the two or three dozen of you in the English-speaking world who have yet to sign up for Facebook can have a limited access to this trove of photographic evidence of subliteracy by buying I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar: A Collection of Egregious Errors, Disconcerting Bloopers, and Other Linguistic Slip-ups (St. Martin’s Griffin, 146 pages, $9.99).
I myself have passed up the opportunity to sign up for the Facebook group. Having gone gray in more than thirty years of struggle against entrenched ignorance and slipshod writing, I have withdrawn to the last redoubt. No more flailing against the grocer’s apostrophe (MELON’S) or defective signage, e-mails and text messages, I huddle behind a few crumbling ravelins and revetments to defend what is left of published prose attempted in standard written English. No doubt Ms. Nichols and her sidekicks are younger and more agile.
What they have discovered is the abiding difficulty that people who write in English have with contractions, possessives, pronouns, and homonyms.
The it’s/its confusion crops up repeatedly. So does the your/you’re issue, as in this Highland Park Junior High School Sign:
SOMETIMES YOUR THE DOG, SOMETIMES YOUR THE HYDRANT
(No doubt the ageless wisdom counterbalances the grammatical issue.)
Or this:
THERE BACK
CHICKEN FLAUTAS
Some of the confusions are homonyms are deeply regrettable, as at a nursery that presumably had peonies for sale:
FRESH CUT PENIS
Or the bakery:
SENTED HOLE WEET
Or the restaurant:
SOUTHERN BEASTRO
Sometimes it is just tangled syntax:
KIDS WITH GAS EAT FREE
But for my money, the most regrettable lapses occur with people who are attempting to be superior, as in this sign from the Village of Crestwood, Chester Stranczek, Mayor:
ENGLISH IS OUR LANGUAGE
NO EXCETIONS
LEARN IT
A lesson apparently yet to be learned by a protester carrying a handmade sign:
GET A
BRAIN!
MORANS
There is little doubt that we speakers of English are a judgmental bunch, quick to calculate our relative superiority or inferiority against everyone else who speaks or writes the language, and this book will give you a sense of that quiet, buoyant sense of superiority that is so much to be desired.
Good for you.
When you think you know something, come to me.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
How dumb can you get?
Stupidity used to be defined, at least in Baltimore, by the guys who decided to rob a gun store on Harford Road in Parkville. They attached a chain to the barred window of the store, the other end to the bumper of their pickup truck. They intended to floor the accelerator and pull the bars out, smash into the store, and make off with a couple of armloads of guns before police arrived. But the bars held; the bumper gave way. In a panic, they sped off, leaving the bumper, with the license plate, attached to the chain. They were arrested the next day.
So it would take a lot to be dumber than that. But perhaps you have nominees.
Such anyone who refuses to drop the knife or gun when confronted by an armed police officer.
Or the dolt who published a “Should Obama be killed?” poll on Facebook — who can expect a visit from the Secret Service momentarily.
There’s the gentleman who posted his views on Facebook opposing Maryland’s new no-texting-while-driving law:
Not sure why I have to follow a law like this. I know how to text and drive at the same time and have not had any accidents as a result.
I feel so left out of the law making process in this state, so why should I follow laws that I didn't even have a hand in creating? Just sets up a funny social system...that's all. I guess people will follow the law because they are scared of the police and the legal system.
There’s a potential Darwin Award winner (as well as someone who apparently dozed during civics class).
Can you top these? Go ahead; try. Please, no nominations of people whose political views merely conflict with your own; I’ll delete those. It has to be something really, really stupid, and this great Republic surely boasts inexhaustible reserves of imbecility.
So it would take a lot to be dumber than that. But perhaps you have nominees.
Such anyone who refuses to drop the knife or gun when confronted by an armed police officer.
Or the dolt who published a “Should Obama be killed?” poll on Facebook — who can expect a visit from the Secret Service momentarily.
There’s the gentleman who posted his views on Facebook opposing Maryland’s new no-texting-while-driving law:
Not sure why I have to follow a law like this. I know how to text and drive at the same time and have not had any accidents as a result.
I feel so left out of the law making process in this state, so why should I follow laws that I didn't even have a hand in creating? Just sets up a funny social system...that's all. I guess people will follow the law because they are scared of the police and the legal system.
There’s a potential Darwin Award winner (as well as someone who apparently dozed during civics class).
Can you top these? Go ahead; try. Please, no nominations of people whose political views merely conflict with your own; I’ll delete those. It has to be something really, really stupid, and this great Republic surely boasts inexhaustible reserves of imbecility.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Your votes and patronage appreciated
Word arrived Friday that I have been nominated for a Mobbie, one of The Baltimore Sun’s awards for outstanding Maryland blogs. Voting begins today, and embarrassing as it is to engage in self-promotion, I am soliciting your support.
You Don’t Say is listed at the end of the Misfits catagory (natch), with a link allowing you to vote. There is also a link at the top of the site to allow votes for best overall blog. For reasons that I do not understand but which surely lie deep in Maryland’s electoral traditions, you can cast more than one vote — once a day until the polls close at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9.
Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.
You Don’t Say is listed at the end of the Misfits catagory (natch), with a link allowing you to vote. There is also a link at the top of the site to allow votes for best overall blog. For reasons that I do not understand but which surely lie deep in Maryland’s electoral traditions, you can cast more than one vote — once a day until the polls close at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 9.
Should you not care to participate in this poll, offering me a job would be an acceptable alternative.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Purging the books
Every few years, it seems, some necessity demands removal of superfluous books from the shelves — or books that can be perceived as superfluous, if there are such things. When I was dealt a hand of aces and eights at The Sun in April, I had two cartons of books to remove from the premises. I can smuggle an occasional volume past Kathleen, but an additional bookcase would not escape her vigilant eye. Something has to go.
I am fifty-eight years old, and chances seem remote that I will ever make another run at Finnegans Wake. Off to the used-book sale at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill. Back editions of the Associated Press Stylebook are an easy choice.
But sentiment is hard to eliminate from these operations. I still regret having sacrificed the paperback edition of Philip Larkin’s High Windows that I bought in 1985 at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe while interviewing at The Sun, even though I have the contents in his Collected Poems. And despite the wreckage of my ambition to be an eighteenth-century man, I will not let go of Arthur Hoffman’s book on Dryden’s imagery or his late monograph on the plays of Congreve until I have to pack my bindle for the Old Editors’ Home. Professor Hoffman was a witty and engaging teacher of the old school, and he was kind to me. And I am not giving up Gibbon; one has to have something in reserve for retirement.
Discarding The Structuralist Controversy, however, leaves no pang.
Jane Austen and Barbara Pym stay, but perhaps it’s time to give up on Byron’s Don Juan. Nobody’s touching John McPhee or my ratty but complete paperback set of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. But Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have started four times without ever making appreciable progress, gets the boot. Boswell and Johnson, you may have guessed, are secure. So are Edmund Wilson and John Cheever. And the poets: Roethke, Jarrell, Lowell, Wilbur, Hecht, Kumin, Van Duyn.
But a shadow looms over numerous others.
Some of these books I have carted from premises to premises since the 1970s, with good intentions, but it is in the nature of things that the Long Parliament sooner or later gives way to the Rump. Farewell, my lovelies.
I am fifty-eight years old, and chances seem remote that I will ever make another run at Finnegans Wake. Off to the used-book sale at the Festival-on-the-Hill in Bolton Hill. Back editions of the Associated Press Stylebook are an easy choice.
But sentiment is hard to eliminate from these operations. I still regret having sacrificed the paperback edition of Philip Larkin’s High Windows that I bought in 1985 at Louie’s Bookstore Cafe while interviewing at The Sun, even though I have the contents in his Collected Poems. And despite the wreckage of my ambition to be an eighteenth-century man, I will not let go of Arthur Hoffman’s book on Dryden’s imagery or his late monograph on the plays of Congreve until I have to pack my bindle for the Old Editors’ Home. Professor Hoffman was a witty and engaging teacher of the old school, and he was kind to me. And I am not giving up Gibbon; one has to have something in reserve for retirement.
Discarding The Structuralist Controversy, however, leaves no pang.
Jane Austen and Barbara Pym stay, but perhaps it’s time to give up on Byron’s Don Juan. Nobody’s touching John McPhee or my ratty but complete paperback set of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries. But Gravity’s Rainbow, which I have started four times without ever making appreciable progress, gets the boot. Boswell and Johnson, you may have guessed, are secure. So are Edmund Wilson and John Cheever. And the poets: Roethke, Jarrell, Lowell, Wilbur, Hecht, Kumin, Van Duyn.
But a shadow looms over numerous others.
Some of these books I have carted from premises to premises since the 1970s, with good intentions, but it is in the nature of things that the Long Parliament sooner or later gives way to the Rump. Farewell, my lovelies.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Zombie editing
Once again this morning, The Sun published an article about someone who suffered nonlife-threatening injuries.* Life-threatening is bad enough, but something severe enough to threaten nonlife — zombies, please take care — must be extraordinary.
Applying the Associated Press Stylebook’s rule — that the prefix non is not hyphenated, except when it is** — requires a little thought, a little attention, a little judgment. Supplies of those qualities appear to be running short.
*Yes, I wrote about the same construction in July. They don’t listen.
**Thank you, AP.
Applying the Associated Press Stylebook’s rule — that the prefix non is not hyphenated, except when it is** — requires a little thought, a little attention, a little judgment. Supplies of those qualities appear to be running short.
*Yes, I wrote about the same construction in July. They don’t listen.
**Thank you, AP.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Are you a closet Socialist?
Amid all the cries of “Socialism!” as the Congress has grappled with the problems of reshaping the nation’s health care system, I thought that it would be helpful to get a clearer idea of what the nation is up against. This would be particularly useful in identifying what used to be called “creeping socialism,” the insidious practices catching the citizenry unaware.
Accordingly, I took a look at the Socialist Party platform for 1912, the year Woodrow Wilson, nominated in sweaty Baltimore, defeated William Howard Taft. Amid a lot of boilerplate about workers and collective ownership, there were these platform planks:
[S]ecuring for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
[F]orbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
[A]bolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributary system of old age pensions, a general system of insurance by the State of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against industrial diseases, accidents and death.
The adoption of a graduated income tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin-the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
Citizens, be alert!
Accordingly, I took a look at the Socialist Party platform for 1912, the year Woodrow Wilson, nominated in sweaty Baltimore, defeated William Howard Taft. Amid a lot of boilerplate about workers and collective ownership, there were these platform planks:
[S]ecuring for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.
[F]orbidding the employment of children under sixteen years of age.
[A]bolishing official charity and substituting a non-contributary system of old age pensions, a general system of insurance by the State of all its members against unemployment and invalidism and a system of compulsory insurance by employers of their workers, without cost to the latter, against industrial diseases, accidents and death.
The adoption of a graduated income tax and the extension of inheritance taxes, graduated in proportion to the value of the estate and to nearness of kin-the proceeds of these taxes to be employed in the socialization of industry.
Unrestricted and equal suffrage for men and women.
The adoption of the initiative, referendum and recall and of proportional representation, nationally as well as locally.
The granting of the right of suffrage in the District of Columbia with representation in Congress and a democratic form of municipal government for purely local affairs.
The enactment of further measures for general education and particularly for vocational education in useful pursuits. The Bureau of Education to be made a department.
Citizens, be alert!
Today's word: egregious
Egregious (adj.) From the Latin egregius (surpassing, illustrious). Formerly excellent, outstanding, or distinguished. Now used almost exclusively to mean excessive, flagrant, or repellent.
It is always helpful to illustrate the use of a word. Yesterday, several sources (my spies are everywhere) brought to my attention the most egregious allusion to the September 11 attacks that I have ever seen in print.
An article by Karl Raymond, the sports editor of the Sun Prairie Star of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was published with these opening paragraphs:
The nightmare of 9/11 will live forever in our minds and memories.
Fast forward eight years later and last Friday, Sept. 11 is a night the Sun Prairie High School football team, coaching staff and Cardinal fans hope can soon be forgotten. Dealt a 22-0 halftime deficit by Madison Memorial in a Big Eight Conference football game at Ashley Field, the Cardinals made an inspiring comeback in the second half but never fully recovered, falling to the Spartans, 22-14.
Please note the elements: the platitudinous opening sentence, the fast forward to cliche, the two clotted sentences that delay to the very end the magnitude (22-14) of this colossal defeat, and the utter, grotesque disproportion of the two events.
Bonus word of the day:
Execrable (adj.) From the French exécrable, ultimately from the Latin verb execrari (to curse). Of wretched quality, bad beyond description,
That someone would attempt such a comparison is monstrous enough, but presumably someone else displayed the execrable judgment to allow it to be published.
It is always helpful to illustrate the use of a word. Yesterday, several sources (my spies are everywhere) brought to my attention the most egregious allusion to the September 11 attacks that I have ever seen in print.
An article by Karl Raymond, the sports editor of the Sun Prairie Star of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was published with these opening paragraphs:
The nightmare of 9/11 will live forever in our minds and memories.
Fast forward eight years later and last Friday, Sept. 11 is a night the Sun Prairie High School football team, coaching staff and Cardinal fans hope can soon be forgotten. Dealt a 22-0 halftime deficit by Madison Memorial in a Big Eight Conference football game at Ashley Field, the Cardinals made an inspiring comeback in the second half but never fully recovered, falling to the Spartans, 22-14.
Please note the elements: the platitudinous opening sentence, the fast forward to cliche, the two clotted sentences that delay to the very end the magnitude (22-14) of this colossal defeat, and the utter, grotesque disproportion of the two events.
Bonus word of the day:
Execrable (adj.) From the French exécrable, ultimately from the Latin verb execrari (to curse). Of wretched quality, bad beyond description,
That someone would attempt such a comparison is monstrous enough, but presumably someone else displayed the execrable judgment to allow it to be published.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The downward spiral
Yesterday the Lexington Herald-Leader laid off Brian Throckmorton, who oversaw the copy desk. Mr. Throckmorton, an amiable colleague, is an energetic editor with good ideas and high standards. I have watched him conduct workshops on editing in mute admiration.
His departure is one more depressing instance of the purge of talent and ability taking place at the nation’s newspapers, and the consequences for those papers will not be good.
For an example of those consequences: The City/Region section of today’s Herald-Leader proclaims that it is published on Thurday, Septmeber 24.
No doubt many other marks of excellence can be discovered therein.
His departure is one more depressing instance of the purge of talent and ability taking place at the nation’s newspapers, and the consequences for those papers will not be good.
For an example of those consequences: The City/Region section of today’s Herald-Leader proclaims that it is published on Thurday, Septmeber 24.
No doubt many other marks of excellence can be discovered therein.
Punctuation without fear
Today is National Punctuation Day, one of those gimmicky holidays on which one can be jocular or sober or both. Last year I posted a sentence that incorporated the standard punctuation marks. This year, some practical advice.
The comma
By now you should have figured out where the comma is required, such as setting off appositives and nonrestrictive clauses, and where it is discretionary to mimic the rhythms of speech.
What some of you have not grasped, and I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room now, is the difference between a compound sentence and a compound predicate, because a lot of you habitually omit the comma in the former and wantonly insert it in the latter.
Attend, please:
When two independent clauses are joined by and, but, or or, separate them with a comma. The trumpet sounded, and the marchers set forth.
When a subject has two verbs, it is not necessary to separate the verbs with a comma. The trumpet sounded and propelled the marchers forward.
The semicolon
No one has written more vividly about punctuation than Nicholson Baker, whose 1993 essay, “The History of Punctuation,”* is reprinted in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber.
The semicolon, he writes, the latest-arriving of the standard punctuation marks, is “even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism; instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice—all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, ‘pour m’appauvrir’: to impoverish himself.
“Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first ‘allowed [him] to write,’ thought that the semi-colon was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semi-colon survives, far too subtle and useful, it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called ‘smileys’ or ‘emoticons’—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph—e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the ‘wink’ or ‘smirk,’ thus—;-).”
The dash* and the hyphen
Hyphens join; dashes separate.
When you make use of compound modifiers, as in Mr. Baker’s “one-size-fits-all commas,” make sure that each part of the compound is linked with a hyphen.
When you make use of a dash to indicate some discontinuity, some branching off from the main line of the sentence, make sure that you have a dash, not a hyphen. Take the trouble to learn how to make a dash in your word-processing software. (Those of you bold enough to embark on the subtleties differentiating the use of the en-dash and em-dash can resort to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should you not return by sundown, we’ll send out a search-and-rescue party.)
And, I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room again — sit up and pay attention — stop using all those dashes for mere parenthetical elements that could just as well be set off with commas.
The period
When you have said all you have to say, come to a stop.
*The essay is a review of Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West by M.B. Parkes.
**Mr. Baker devotes considerable space in his essay to his admiration of the nineteenth-century fondness for the dash combined with the comma, semicolon, or colon in the works of Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman, though, regrettably, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, “dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S.”
The comma
By now you should have figured out where the comma is required, such as setting off appositives and nonrestrictive clauses, and where it is discretionary to mimic the rhythms of speech.
What some of you have not grasped, and I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room now, is the difference between a compound sentence and a compound predicate, because a lot of you habitually omit the comma in the former and wantonly insert it in the latter.
Attend, please:
When two independent clauses are joined by and, but, or or, separate them with a comma. The trumpet sounded, and the marchers set forth.
When a subject has two verbs, it is not necessary to separate the verbs with a comma. The trumpet sounded and propelled the marchers forward.
The semicolon
No one has written more vividly about punctuation than Nicholson Baker, whose 1993 essay, “The History of Punctuation,”* is reprinted in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber.
The semicolon, he writes, the latest-arriving of the standard punctuation marks, is “even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism; instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice—all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, ‘pour m’appauvrir’: to impoverish himself.
“Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first ‘allowed [him] to write,’ thought that the semi-colon was ‘ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly’—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semi-colon survives, far too subtle and useful, it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called ‘smileys’ or ‘emoticons’—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph—e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the ‘wink’ or ‘smirk,’ thus—;-).”
The dash* and the hyphen
Hyphens join; dashes separate.
When you make use of compound modifiers, as in Mr. Baker’s “one-size-fits-all commas,” make sure that each part of the compound is linked with a hyphen.
When you make use of a dash to indicate some discontinuity, some branching off from the main line of the sentence, make sure that you have a dash, not a hyphen. Take the trouble to learn how to make a dash in your word-processing software. (Those of you bold enough to embark on the subtleties differentiating the use of the en-dash and em-dash can resort to the Chicago Manual of Style. Should you not return by sundown, we’ll send out a search-and-rescue party.)
And, I’m talking to you journalists in the back of the room again — sit up and pay attention — stop using all those dashes for mere parenthetical elements that could just as well be set off with commas.
The period
When you have said all you have to say, come to a stop.
*The essay is a review of Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West by M.B. Parkes.
**Mr. Baker devotes considerable space in his essay to his admiration of the nineteenth-century fondness for the dash combined with the comma, semicolon, or colon in the works of Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Newman, though, regrettably, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, “dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S.”
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