Word Nerd: D is for Dash

By Rebecca Christian

Aren’t dashes dashing? I love dashes of all kinds—not just punctuation, but also Mrs. Dash Seasoning, those dashing young men in their flying machines, and especially  Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, whose philosophy pretty much sums up mine, “You got to look on the bright side, even when there ain’t one.”

The dash is the Cary Grant of punctuation. Our editor in chief Ann Maine is mighty fond of dashes—they crop up like dandelions in her letter to readers in each issue, as exemplified by her holiday letter, in which she was describing a family’s holiday rituals:

“There they tell stories into the night in front of a crackling fire, while their trio of golden retrievers—jolly in their red bandannas—cuddles in to keep them warm.”

Substitute commas—as below—and her sentence doesn’t have the same, well, dash:

“There they tell stories into the night in front of a crackling fire, while their trio of golden retrievers, jolly in their red bandannas, cuddles in to keep them warm.”

See what I mean? I use dashes promiscuously sometimes—I need a support group—but at least I don’t abuse exclamation points. Ms. Maine, however, had ample justification for her dashes in the example above. A dash is used when a period is too much and a comma is not enough, because you are introducing a pause in thought, an aside, an afterthought, or an interruption. It also works when you make an abrupt change in subject or direction, like freeway drivers who realize at the last second that they are about to miss their exit and then swerve into the outbound lane as if fleeing to the promised land.  The dash is also sometimes used for attribution before a byline:

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window.”—Raymond Chandler.

You may also use it in a series within a phrase:

“The designer has the qualities—flair, tact, insistence on quality—that any homeowner appreciates.”

On a Mac, you make the dash by holding down shift, option and the dash/hyphen key.

There are other arcane dashes—the swung dash, the figure dash—that sound like what you might learn in those ballroom dancing classes married couples go to because it’s marginally more fun than therapy and much cheaper, but for everyday use, it’s more than enough to know the difference between the en dash and the em dash. The em dash, or long dash, is the alpha of the dash pack, and it’s the one used in all of the examples so far. The en dash, as befits its lowlier status, is half the width of an em, and is used to indicate relationship, range, or connection: the L.A.–New York flight, a May–December romance, $50–$75. On a Mac, you make the en dash by holding down the option key and dash/hyphen key. If you’re on a PC, Bubba, you’re on your own.

Many use the en dash and hyphen interchangeably, and I confess to being one of them. This is increasingly permissible, and it might as well be because most people outside of the dandruffy little world of copyediting don’t know their dash from their elbow. The main thing to remember about the hyphen is that like the woman who belongs to the P.E.O, the Junior League, the Red Hats, the D.A.R.,  and the Sears Panty Club (buy 12, get one free), it’s a joiner. It’s used in compound words and adjectives, or to form a single idea from two or more words, such as passive-aggressive. You also use it to avoid confusion:

“Traditional Home editor in chief Ann Maine spoke to the group of large-design firm owners.”

Without the hyphen, it would sound as if we were calling the owners large, not the firms. And that, my dears, could lead to hyphen-ventilation.