Orthographic elegance has been dashed on the rocks of human suspicion
From time to time a vision of the past pops into my head. At once trivial and yet somehow foundational, I find myself in the attic poking around the kipple of shattered dreams: my father’s photographic equipment, left over from a hobby he had no time to pursue, a rusty Tonka (or was it off-brand) truck and, for some reason, a memento mori in the form of a memorial vase.
One object was a particular object of desire: a gigantic electromechanical typewriter, Olympia I think – or was it Minolta? – that seemed the size of an aircraft carrier. Enticing, forbidden, and capable of making an astonishing racket, this thing was already out of date. We had a computer in the house, after all, albeit not equipped with a printer. Still, pens existed.
In secondary school, my homework, on the rare occasions when it required typing, was done on a rather more modest machine in the form of a cheap Bulgarian knock-off of an Olivetti mechanical typewriter, won in some long-forgotten competition. I still own this thing, resplendent in its teal case, though today it is more of an ornament than a tool.
It would have been no match for the beast in the attic, of course. Not only did this machine, like many, lack any dashes at all, so forcing typists to bash out two consecutive hyphens like this: –. It didn’t even feature an exclamation mark. Arguably this made for better writing, mind, and if you really wanted to over-egg the point you could jury-rig one by combining an apostrophe and a full stop.
My point here is that technology has an impact on how we marshal language and, if I may make a short leap, therefore how we think.
Many people of my mother’s age, for instance, insist on typing two spaces after a full stop. Some Word Processors still force this on users, despite the fact that writing on a computer has put an end to monospaced text.
Not that I fancy myself the Anglophone equivalent of the Académie Française, almost certainly the answer to a question no-one asked. Certainly readers of this column will know that I do occasionally drop the odd orthographic clanger.
For those who don’t know, en and em dashes are, more or less, interchangeable, but they are used differently. En dashes are used for closed ranges (1848–1921), whereas the longer em dash—this thing—is used for open ranges (1985—). Both can be used for a clause, aside, or break in thought.
Elegant, human and just a little bit dramatic, an em dash indicates a stronger or more suddenly arrived at clause than a mere pair of commas. (And let’s not even speak of the horror of parentheses.) An en dash can be used the same way, of course, just with spaces. It’s not wrong, it’s just less pleasing to the eye.
Hyphens – which look like this – – are another thing altogether.
Starting out as a journalist, I was equipped with an Apple Macintosh (I went to art school, after all), the upshot of which was that dashes were only a modifier key away. Two modifiers if I wanted the em dash. What Windows users did, I have no idea. Perhaps they just hoped the software would convert their double-parked hyphens into one. Today, using Linux I am forced to cast an arcane spell – control and shift, then u, then 2013 – if I have the temerity to insert a clause.
True, great writing goes easy on the dash. But I am a journalist, so speed, consistency and sticking to the style guide is more important than strict adherence to the ill explained rules of the English language.
Read widely today and you will see that the beautiful em dash is enjoying a resurgence – but it is a false dawn.
Raised from its slumber by chatbots, the em dash is the dash of choice of artificial intelligence (AI). This has not gone unnoticed. From academics – some might say scholars – on the hunt for chancers among their students to social media users always ready to think the worst of their peers, the sight of an em dash today results in a chorus of condemnation: “OK, bot!”
Irksome as this is, I concede the battle is lost. It seems the em dash has had its day.
Being able to identify the pablum churned out by machines is as important a skill as the ability to identify the phoned-in pablum churned out by semi-educated – and unduly pedantic – journalists. Forgive me three times, then: once for my pedantry, once more for my mistakes and, then again for lamenting the loss of this thing of beauty—this symbol that I can no longer, in good conscience, use.
I surrender.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers