[gui-talk] The voicing of m dash

[Joel Deutsch]

Lloyd,

that article  you linked us to from the site called A List apart ,, aimed at 
Web developers to encourage proper, deliberate use of dash-like characters, 
may be a little more information than some of us may feel we need to know, 
as the expression goes, but it's very thorough and ought to be helpful 
especially to someone who's been completely unaware of these distinctions 
and has suspected that dash and hyphen might just be synonyms, and that em 
dash and en dash were really and terminally mysterious terms.

were,wondered what's up with A couple of the uses the article describes for 
these  characters are ones I left out because I was tired, do not have an 
extremely methodical mind, and finally take so much for granted that I just 
didn't think about them, and restricted myself to the only examples that 
occurred to me when I was typing my message. But for anyone really 
interested in what this stuff is all about, in terms of its typographical 
meaning (and therefore the meaning these things have to the writer and the 
reader) will find the one paragraph I'm referring to completely 
enlightening. In fact, I'm going to select, copy and paste it below what I'm 
writing here in order to isolate it from the other stuff about what the 
article was concerning itself with, which was Web design in terms of 
typography. That's the part that's a little geeky if such a concern might 
seem out of your league or not relevant to your interest in regard to dashes 
and all that stuff.

So, with thanks to Lloyd again for pointing us to this reference, here's the 
paragraph wherein all these marks are explained, including the distinction 
between hyphen and dash, which I omitted because the character we produce by 
pressing the dash/minus key looks the same and I just didn't want to get 
into it. But I did explain that it's the short line, or dash, that we use to 
indicate a two-part word or term, and I simply omitted to say a "hyphenated" 
word because  I felt afraid of getting too profuse with my explanation. but 
the article says one interesting thing on this point, which is that this 
keyboard key exists in a kind of limbo where it may be officially called the 
dash or minus, but what it produces visibly, so to speak, winds up defined 
by its use and its positioning within text, and this creates confusion in 
anyone who's thinking "so why don't they call it the dash/minus/hyphen key, 
for goodness' sake? :-)

anyway, here's that paragraph. One thing to not worry about is any advice in 
this article about not using, say, that dash character as a minus because it 
won't fall in the right position or be correct in some other way, because 
these guys are talking about really particular issues of character 
production in Web text creation, as if they were printers discussing 
printing issues. This is a level beyond what we do when we type text and 
characters to write email messages or produce perfectly literate, legible 
word processing documents. If you read that stuff and try to fathom it, it 
may make your head spin trying to imagine complications that don't even 
apply to most of us in our actual writing tasks, even if we're being as 
responsible as we possibly can. Not to worry about such things, I suggest. 
Also, note the reference to the Chicago Manual of Style. This is one of a 
very few "stylebooks" that professional editors, as well as university 
students writing formal papers and theses look to for guidance on all 
matters of grammatical and typographical style. If you're intrested in such 
"bibles," maybe there are electronic editions of them to be had somewhere, 
I'm guessing maybe Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic may have things 
like that in some format. But for writers out in the world, whether they're 
engaged with business correspondence, quality journalism, fiction and 
nonfiction, the utility of something like the Chicago Manual of Style is 
moot or, at best, academic, as they say. Again, not something to worry about 
as if it were a secret rule book you, as a mere mortal, weren't given a copy 
of as you came into the room, so to speak. That said, these things about 
dashes and hyphens and the like are real and worth knowing, the same as a 
lot of grammatical rules are important to know in order to simply be a 
literate writer. I'm only saying that the chicago Manual of Style is not 
where to go to figure out ordinary writing problems like these, even though 
it of course encompasses such issues within its purview. Sort of the way 
it's really more useful to check the American Heritage dictionary or Merriam 
Webster's or something, a high -quality general purpose dictionary, than to 
run to the full-length edition of the Oxfored English dictionary where, for 
one thing, you find mostly British usages, as well as a perspective on the 
history of a word that pays more attention to its history in English writing 
over the centuries than to a meaningful tracing of the word's etymology and 
evolution through the history of language itself.

Ah, I just thought of a very nice online source for exploring all kinds of 
grammar issues, very user friendly and screen reader accessible. It's called 
grammargirl.com. Let me see if that's actually the right URL... Ggrammaramm.

Glad I checked. It's actually

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/default.aspx


All that said, here's the paragraph.

The correct use of em and en

The em dash (—) is used to indicate a sudden break in thought ("I was 
thinking about writing a-what time did you say the movie started?"), a 
parenthetical
statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead 
of a colon or semicolon to link clauses. It is also used to indicate an open
range, such as from a given date with no end yet (as in "Peter Sheerin 
[1969-] authored this document."), or vague dates (as a stand-in for the 
last two
digits of a four-digit year).

Two adjacent em dashes (a 2-em dash) are used to indicate missing letters in 
a word ("I just don't f--ing care about 3.0 browsers").

Three adjacent em dashes (a 3-em dash) are used to substitute for the author's 
name when a repeated series of works are presented in a bibliography, as
well as to indicate an entire missing word in the text.

The en dash (–) is used to indicate a range of just about anything 
with numbers, including dates, numbers, game scores, and pages in any sort 
of document.

It is also used instead of the word "to" or a hyphen to indicate a 
connection between things, including geographic references (like the 
Mason-Dixon Line)
and routes (such as the New York-Boston commuter train).

It is used to hyphenate compounds of compounds, where at least one pair is 
already hyphenated (as in "Netscape 6.1 is an Open-Source-based browser."). 
The
Chicago Manual of style also states that it should be used "Where one of the 
components of a compound adjective contains more than one word," instead of
a hyphen (as in "Netscape 6.1 is an Open Source-based browser"). Both of 
these rules are for clarity in indicating exactly what is being modified by 
the
compound.

Other sources also specify the use of an en dash when referring to joint 
authors, as in the "Bose-Einstein" paper. Some also prefer it to a hyphen 
when
text is set in all capital letters.

Some typographers prefer to use an en dash surrounded by full spaces instead 
of an em dash. Others prefer to insert hair spaces on either side of the em
dash, but this is problematic with some web browsers (see the section on 
spaces for more detail).

Hyphenate This

That hyphen you can insert with the key next to the zero on your keyboard is 
an ambiguous character suffering from an identity crisis. It can't decide if
it's a hyphen, a minus, or an en dash-in fact, the Unicode specification 
describes it as "hyphen-minus" and defines very specific replacements for 
each
of its personalities.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lloyd Rasmussen" <lras at loc.gov>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2007 6:34 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] The voicing of m dash


I had read about an "em" and an "en" in a braille dictionary in the
60's.  But I didn't have to deal with this stuff until we moved from
typewriters to typography, in the Windows era.  If you ignore some of the
geeky stuff toward the beginning, this six-year-old article about
typography on the web will add a little more information to Joel's 
exposition.

http://www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/

At 10:17 PM 10/4/2007, you wrote:
>What's the difference in meaning between the two characters?  I don't
>remember seeing anything about it in school in the 50's and 60's, and
>haven't heard any explanation of it since.  In fact, asking sighted folks
>I know they tell me they never use it and don't understand why some
>publications do.
>
>I'd be interested to know.

Lloyd Rasmussen, Acting Head, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress    (202) 707-0535   <http://www.loc.gov/nls>
HOME:  <http://lras.home.sprynet.com>
The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent
those of NLS.

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