Steve -- Great musings on the lowly dash.
On Wed, Nov 20, 2013, Steve Izma wrote: > Yet I'll admit that my idea of dashes is not traditional: I > consider a dash not to be a punctuation mark affixed to another > object (e.g., as a period to a sentence or a comma to a phrase), > but more like an operator between two parallel clauses -- like > the boolean "and" and "or" between expressions. So it's related > to but independent of its surroundings, and using the currently > available stretchable word spaces clarify that relationship. A wit once said that em-dashes are the educated writer's parentheses. Snootiness aside, it's mostly true. Almost any textual material--as opposed to references--that might be put in parentheses can go between dashes. So your test, "related to but independent of its surroundings," is valid and well-expressed. As to spacing around dashes, the school of typography to which I belong sanctions either em-dashes with no space or en-dashes with unbreakable spaces. I favour the former. In the case of dashes that, for purposes of justification, must either end a line or begin it, there's no visual confusion. Space before a dash can leave it looking stranded when it's terminal, and unrelated to the sentence when it's initial. In groff, 'word\:\[em]\:word' works well in most cases. Occasionally, there's a problem with the word itself hyphenating on short intial or terminal syllables, but that's easily enough fixed. I notice in older published material (say, Poe published in the 19th century), that dashes are not of fixed length, and are always joined to the preceding and following word, except in the case of line breaks. -- Peter Schaffter http://www.schaffter.ca
