Punctuation Comic

Some punctuation puns.

I should add that an M-dash is three times longer than a hyphen. And be sure to pronounce the second “s” in asterisk.

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We have four kinds of horizontal lines in English typography. Everybody knows about the hyphen; you even have two keys for it on your keyboard, the minus key, and up toward the right end of the top row of keys. Speaking of that key, the slightly longer horizontal line above the hyphen is, counterintuitively, the underscore character. (If you want the underscore under letters, you have to use the underscore font style, Ctrl-u in MS Word.)

You might or might not know about the other two horizontal lines, the N-dash and the M-dash. (Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 respectively. Hold down the Alt key while you type the digits on the numeric keypad.)

• Use the N-dash to show a range; your work hours are 9–5, for example.
• Use the M-dash to show a break in thought. It’s like a strong parenthesis.

And here we come to the matter of style:

Don’t put spaces around your dashes.

Those spaces waste space. Here’s an otherwise good sentence with those bad spaces:

That year — 2014 — three young quantum gravity researchers came to an astonishing realization. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-space-and-time-could-be-a-quantum-error-correcting-code-20190103

Yes, you can insert the spaces, but don’t.

PS—I just ran into an alternative to the M-dash in a place where I’m not used to seeing it: Professional writing. That alternative is two hyphens. Typing two hyphens is okay for casual writing, say, on a typewriter, but not in an ezine article. I suspect his editor was asleep n the job. Here’s the sentence:

Hope you stayed up late watching West Coast basketball (and/or the Masked Singer premiere) last night — otherwise you might’ve missed the quasi-surprise drop of this April’s entire Coachella lineup at 11:28 p.m. ET. 

https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/festivals/8492113/coachella-2018-lineup-five-takeaways

Don’t do that, either.

The rule about hyphenating compound words is that the hyphen tends to go away if the word is common enough. We used to write “to-day” instead of “today,” for example. A more recent change is “web site” to “website,” now unhyphenated even when used as a compound adjective. 

Here’s one that should definitely still get the hyphen:

On April 30, the Pu‘u ‘O‘o crater on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, suddenly collapsed. It was the starting point for the volcano’s monthslong eruption, which went on to produce 320,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth of lava that transformed the landscape and ultimately destroyed 700 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/science/kilauea-hawaii-volcano-eruption.html

That’s a months-long eruption. That “nthsl” is just too long, and besides, where does the “s” go? I’m not aware of anything called a “slong.” It’s a good thing that the sentence didn’t have “swimmingpoolsworth.”

Remember, the goal of expository writing is to be clear. Try not to have bumps in your readers’ road.

PS—Those apostrophes in P’u ‘O’o aren’t contractions. They represent glottal stops, which English uses, but doesn’t have a letter for.

I mention compound adjectives occasionally; here’s a good example of the difference in meaning when you hyphenate or don’t hyphenate.

Sometimes you have two or more modifiers before a noun. If the first word refers to the next one, you hyphenate them and they function as one word. If they separately refer to the noun, don’t hyphenate. 

She is correct! To have “big” refer to the mosquitoes, it should be “big-mosquito lake.”

PS—yes, “mosquito” is a noun, not an adjective. But it’s being used as an adjective. We call this using the noun attributively.

English has a tendency to change hyphenated compounds into single compound words over time. For example, “today” used to be “to-day,” and “pickup truck” used to be “pick-up truck.” This process takes a generation or so to happen. As people become more and more familiar with a phrase, they tend to leave out the hyphen. (We call this sort of thing linguistic change. Linguistic change is a common source of grumbling among grammar curmudgeons.)

Today I read an article by a reporter who covers politics. He used a compound word that I would have hyphenated. IMO the spelling is on the early side:

The decadesold informal understanding between the government and the press — that the government would only go through the motions on leak investigations — was dead.

I’m not saying he’s wrong, just early. We don’t use “decades-old” very often.

You saw it here first second!

PS—I ran into another premature compound (for the moment, we’ll ignore the false subject and “upon” where they should use “on.”):

There is a critical need to establish organizationwide data security policies and controls based upon DSG.