The Difference between a Dash and a Hyphen

Dashes are longer than hyphens. The difference is hard to discern in this comic, but in the first panel, the text has a dash in “day—fresh” (or so it looks like to me) and a hyphen in “fresh-squeezed.” This is correct! The sentence means something like “on this hot summer day you get fresh-squeezed lemonade.” And the cartoonist used a break (which is what we use dashes for) instead of “you get.” If the sentence had had hyphens in both places, you’d have “day-fresh-lemonade,” (a compound adjective) which kind of doesn’t make sense.

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—when they are used together! Here’s the caption:

Houston is seen as an attractive location for solar manufacturing plants due to the high amount of new solar installations in the state and the proximity to the Port of Houston.

And here’s the picture:

Use either “high number” or “huge amount.” We use “high” when we’re counting with numbers, and “huge” with either numbers or things we’re measuring.

A lesson about compound adjectives. Last speech in the last two panels:

When two words together refer to a third word, alwayse hyphenate the two words! So it should be “follow-up question.” Unless one of the two words is an adverb, such as “very.” Adverbs can directly modify adjectives, so they don’t need the hyphen. This can be a very tricky rule to get right.

How do you pronunce this? Here’s the discussion:

Do you know of anyone whos says “sherbet” instead of “sherbert”?

I didn’t read this carefully the first time, so it took me a moment to get the joke. Do you?

“Eclipse” does look rather like “ellipsis.” Ellipsis is the name of those three dots in text to represent something left out; it looks like this: …

It’s a geek joke, I guess.