The Hyphen, the Em Dash and the En Dash

If you think all dashes and hyphens are interchangeable, you’re mistaken, my friend—sadly mistaken. You need to learn yesterday about the differences among these marks of punctuation. I’m here today to tell you about how to use the hyphen, the en dash and the em dash.

The hyphen (-) is the easy one. It’s the short dash you make with one stroke of your keyboard. The hyphen appears at the end of a line of text when the last word stretches beyond that line. You would also use a hyphen for compound adjectives, especially before a noun. Examples of this include “state-of-the-art cattle prod,” “93-year-old mime” or “post-orchiectomy.” You would also use a hyphen in a hyphenated last name, like Manigault-Newman.

An em dash (—) is the longest dash. You can keep this and the en dash straight because an m is wider than an n and so an em dash is wider than an en dash. You would use this mostly to separate one clause from another in a dramatic way, sometimes without a conjunction, or to join two separate sentences. For example, “He swallowed the poison—and died.” You’d also use an em dash as an appositive when the sentence already contains serial commas. For example, “The colors of the American flag—red, white and blue—are exceedingly lovely.”

On a Mac, make an em dash by pressing shift+option+hyphen. I guess on a PC, it would be shift+alt+hyphen. You can also type two hyphens on a PC and after you skip a space, the hyphens become an em dash. Should you use a space before or after an em dash? I don’t know if there’s a rule but I think it looks better with no space on either side.

It is exceedingly important—pay attention to this—that you never use a hyphen to join two clauses. This looks awful: “Hyphen use in this case is wrong- dead wrong.” See how bad that looks? I read an article by a copy editor describing her job and it used hyphens instead of em dashes throughout. If the editor did it, I’m sure it was embarrassing for the writer. If the writer did it herself, she’s not a very good copy editor.

The en dash (­–) is a little tricky and it’s one diacritic I never used much until recently. Use an en dash for a range of numbers, like “Class, your assignment is to read The Art of the Deal pages 2–37.” Also use it for a sports score, like “The Eagles beat the Patriots, 45–2.” An en dash is also appropriate to separate two destinations, like “Mumbai–Poughkeepsie flight” or when two separate names come together temporarily in opposition or partnership, like “Palin–Hawking astrophysics debate.” This is different from (or is it different than?) when one person has a hyphenated name, which is—get this—hyphenated. I’ve seen some publications use en dashes for compound adjectives but it doesn’t look right to me.

Type an en dash on a Mac by hitting option+hyphen. I don’t know how to do this on a PC without searching for special characters or those number pad codes nobody really uses. Is it just option+hyphen?

OK, wanna read an example of a hyphen, em dash and en dash in one sentence? “The Strunk–White award for Best-Written Lecture About The Relative Values And Uses Of Barely Distinguishable Horizontal Lines Of Type—an award now in its 45^th year, and voted on by an esteemed panel of Pulitzer-Prize winning writers—has been awarded to Brian McCurdy by a score of 673–4.”

Any hyphen/dash dorks feel free to correct me on the preceding, but I’m pretty arrogant in my self-assurance.

You can actually get non-cheesesteak food 'round these parts

Somewhere during the joy of our Eagles’ blowout win during the NFC Championship game, the Fox broadcast team said it: “The Eagles are hungry, and not just for cheesesteaks.”

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‘Round these parts, we actually offer a full range of foods. In the Philadelphia area, you can get a steak without cheese. You can get various cuts, from porterhouse to filet mignon to skirt steak. You can also get cheese without the steak. There’s cheddar, Swiss, bleu cheese, camembert and more. It doesn’t have to be Cheez Whiz and doesn’t have to come on an Amoroso roll.

But there’s more: people here eat chicken and pork and eggs and rice. We have ice cream. We have rye, wheat and white bread. We have risotto and various types of pasta. There’s a full range of vegetables, from carrots to beans to spinach. You can even get fruit in the Philadelphia metro area, like apples or bananas or pears. There have even been sightings of people eating quiche.

These things are all readily available at supermarkets and stores in our area. So cheesesteaks are not the only option.

After you watch enough nationally televised Eagles or Phillies games, you’ll get used to the lingering shots of steaks on a grill, ready to be topped with cheese and/or onions. It just gets funny and kind of tiresome after awhile. It made me laugh on Sunday, because they mentioned the Eagles being hungry for cheesesteaks and I was picturing elite athletes spending the run-up to the Super Bowl gorging themselves at Pat’s.

How often do people really eat cheesesteaks around here? I’ll have one once in awhile but it’s not like we’re all constantly eating them. (I’ve also never used Cheez Whiz on one. Little known fact for people outside the area: You can actually get other types of cheese on your steak.)

I’m sure other cities have their stereotypes that national broadcasters return to since it’s easy, and I don’t notice because I don’t live there. After so many years of watching sports, it just gets a little amusing and exhausting to hear the same ancient Philadelphia stories trotted out again (like throwing snowballs at Santa, which happened in the waning days of the Johnson administration). It’s like hearing a senile relative tell the same stories every year at Thanksgiving and you smile politely and let your eyes glaze over.

Anyway, go Eagles!

If you can think of a better way to get water, I'd like to hear it

Of course Silicon Valley types are asking us to take out home equity loans to buy “raw water.” Where else are we going to get it? It’s not like water just appears in the atmosphere at regular intervals.

One company is Live Water, which bottles the rare alloy known as “water” and sells bottles of it for $36.99 each. Refills are $14.99 each, a bargain for the savvy shopper. Some guy describes this raw water as not overwhelming the flavor profile, which is a relief to people who are overpowered by the taste of tap water, which can linger on the palate for days.

One person who drinks raw water attributes raw water to feeling that she’s getting more nutrition out of the food she eats. I’m certain this is a quantifiable effect one can feel.

Another company, Zero Mass Water, will install a system that lets you collect water from the atmosphere. What a crazy technological world we live in! The next thing you’ll be telling me is that you can put a seed in the ground and it will eventually produce food.

The founder of Juicero is also involved in the Raw Water Movement. You remember Juicero: It was a dramatically overpriced device for making juice that didn’t work better than something you get at Bed Bath and Beyond but you should spend more money on the Juicero based on the rock-solid reasoning that the inventors wanted you to. Well, after his business failed when nobody honored his request to overspend, he went on a 10-day juice cleanse and had some kind of epiphany to sell unprocessed water to people. Translation: My first brand of snake oil didn’t sell, so here’s another!

Has anyone told Gwyneth Paltrow about raw water? It’s really an amazing business opportunity she could pitch to her fans once they’re done sticking jade eggs into their crotches.

Raw water, of course, is an alternative to the tap water that the overwhelming number of people in this country have been consuming safely for many decades. The water is untreated, so you may get sick from drinking animal poop, but isn’t that a better alternative than drinking fluoride, which They are adding to our water to control our brains?

This whole raw water thing sounds like a conversation where one person makes an obvious, uncontroversial statement with enough evidence to back it up, like, “Processed tap water is overwhelmingly safe.” The other person counters with “But is it?” The first person’s mind is supposed to be blown in a Star Wars warp-effect way and is supposed to question everything. What the second person can’t hear is the Ron Howard Arrested Development voice-over saying, “It is.”

What a spoiled society we live in where things like potable water, vaccines and medications have already solved life-threatening problems for us and it’s still just not good enough for some people. 

Fire and Fury for 'Fire and Fury'

Everything about Fire and Fury—both the revelations about the Trump White House and the president’s reactions—is completely, profoundly hilarious to me.

Instead of playing it cool and ignoring the book’s allegations until people forgot about them, of course President Trump flipped out, personally attacked Steve Bannon with a dumb nickname, issued tweet after tweet about the book, and gathered his Cabinet around in a tableau of sycophancy at Camp David to trash the book. Great work, stable genius. Now the book is selling out and we’re on day six of the news cycle as everyone debates whether or not the president is an incompetent man-baby as the book portrays.

Trump’s reaction has basically proven one of the book’s points: that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Any casual watcher of The West Wing would have known that you stay above the fray in cases like these because your reaction will only elevate the book’s claims. I’m no politician and even I could have told him that much. There are so many of these types of books about politicians and many sink without a trace but now he’s drawing attention to this, attention it may not otherwise have had. As usual, he brought this all on himself. By repeatedly saying “Of course I’m stable,” he’s only making more people question his stability, because stable people don’t have to assert their stability; they just act stably. This is just not the way a competent professional adult responds to this type of controversy.

I think one reason this book isn’t sinking into obscurity is because so many of the claims are plausible, at least from the excerpts I’ve read. I completely believe he didn’t want to be president and nobody in the Trump camp expected him to win because it fits with what we already know. I completely believe he isn't stable because a stable person would not have tweeted about the size of his “nuclear button” to North Korea, among countless other examples. I completely believe Trump watches TV all day because his tweeting chronology confirms that he’s watching Fox News and doing whatever they tell him to.

Everything you need to know about the president’s inability to rise to the responsibilities of his office is right in the public record. The book just provides some gossipy details.

Once I get a copy, I’ll take Michael Wolff’s revelations with a grain of salt, as you should always do with these types of books. (I’ve heard Wolff can be sloppy but unless I missed it, I haven't heard of any specific inaccuracies in this or previous work. Most of what I’ve heard is journalists saying, “Ugh, this guy.”) Even if the details in the book are not perfectly accurate, it is enormously telling that so many people in the administration find the president to be unfit for office.

This is why Trump is not going to sue anybody for defamation. He never follows through with suits in these cases anyway because the discovery would destroy him. You’d see the unseemly parade of administration officials testifying under oath that they don’t think the president is a moron, and I’m not sure all of them would pass the test.

As funny as many of the book’s revelations are on the surface, there’s an outrage to Fire and Fury, and that is so many people around the president feel he is unfit for office, and not one of them has the guts to stand up. This is craven, opportunistic and shameful.

No matter the veracity of this book, there is a greater truth here. People have lined up to buy a book and when was the last time anybody did that for something that wasn’t Harry Potter? This shows that a significant swath of the population just doesn’t have much respect for the president. He said not to buy a book and they did, just to spite him. If people don’t respect Trump, it’s his own fault, since he has very little respect for anybody else. The last year has shown he can dish out the criticism but he really can’t take it.

Diaeresis

This diacritic— ¨— is a diaeresis. Okay?

The two dots over a letter are a diaeresis. The mark indicates that, when two vowels are next to one another, there is a syllabic break between the vowels. Got that? You see this mark in words like “naïve,” with the diaeresis indicating the start of a second syllable. Without the diaeresis, we’d all be pronouncing it as “nave,” not the correct “nigh-EVE.” It’s also in names like “Noël” so when we were singing Christmas carols last month, we were singing the first “No-el” and not the first “Noel.” A diaeresis is also helpful to people named Zoë so other people do not drive them insane when they pronounce that name as one syllable. Okay?

Technically, you should be using a diaeresis in words such as “cooperation” so you pronounce it as “co-OP-er-ate” and not “COOP-er-ate,” which would make you sound like an idiot. But these days, pretty much only the New Yorker still uses diaereses that way.

What a diaeresis is not, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, is an umlaut. This is a mark of punctuation indicating that the vowel in question is pronounced like the sound of another vowel. Okay? This is common in German-derived languages.

Thus, the diacritic in the name of the singer Björk is an umlaut and not a diaeresis. Got that? This means that the “O” is pronounced slightly differently, not that her name is two syllables. In this way, the names Björk and Zoë could not be more different.

I hope you’re getting all this because we, as a society, do need to understand the difference between a diaeresis and an umlaut as diacritics that signify two distinct phonological phenomena.

Join me next time when I give an urgent lesson on the differences among the hyphen, the en dash and the em dash.