PUNCTUATION IS A DEEPLY CONSERVATIVE club. It hardly ever admits a new member. In the sixties, an adman invented the interrobang, a combined question mark and exclamation point, but it did not catch on. Still, considering that we have only a handful of tools—think of them as needles and pins in a sewing kit, or drill bits and screws in a tool chest—the variety of tics that writers develop and effects that they create is astonishing. Even the period, which marks the end of a conventional declarative sentence, can be nuanced, in context. I paged through Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan, which Ed Stringham gave me decades ago and which I still have not found the right moment to read (it just does not sound like a beach book—less so the older I get), and saw sentences strung together like beads . . . Ellipses flowed on for page after page . . . It seemed very modern, like the tendency for an e-mail to trail off, inviting an answer . . . You realize after a while that when you come to the end nothing is going to seem as desperate as that final period.
Which piece of punctuation has the most gumption? You might think it is the exclamation point, also known as the screamer, because it is used sparingly and packs a punch. In German, every command ends with an exclamation point. One imagines that Germans bark at each other a lot. The question mark, by contrast, is gentle, a lazy Irishman. When an utterance is both interrogative and exclamatory—say, “What the devil”—people are sometimes tempted to use both a question mark and an exclamation point, but this is a bad idea. Word order will take care of the interrogative, while the bold exclamation point trumps the hesitant question mark every time.
The interior punctuation that goes on in sentences is even more subtle. It’s like a family—we have built on the comma and the period, and come up with some pretty tough characters, as well as with some snobs and some sainted family members who are ready for anything. For instance, the dash family.
In case the conversation at the dinner table ever turns to dashes, it is best to be prepared. It can happen! You can hold the table spellbound with anecdotes about the dash family. For instance, when I was nine, we moved from a two-family house on West Thirty-ninth Street, on the West Side of Cleveland, out to Meadowbrook Avenue, which was all but technically in the suburbs. I was eager to move—I would have my own bedroom in a two-story house with a real fake fireplace—but I didn’t realize until we were in the new house how much character the old neighborhood had had. It was on the edge of the zoo, and full of hillbillies and immigrants (DPs, in my mother’s term: displaced persons), with last names like Munchauer, Sindelar, Kerfonta, and Sliwka (pronounced “slifka”; years later I learned that it was Polish for “plum”). The new neighborhood was on the other side of the zoo. There were no fences between the houses, and at first we interpreted that to mean that we could run through people’s yards (strike one) and sit on people’s benches (strike two) and coast down the driveway on our ancient oversized tricycle and up the driveway across the street (strike three). Our new neighbors had names like Blank and Dash. Mr. and Mrs. Blank were a crabby old couple who yelled at us when our badminton birdie landed on their lawn. We used a pair of my mother’s clothes poles to retrieve it. The Dashes employed a diaper service and were customers of Charles’ Chips, the house-to-house potato-chip vendor.
If you have no personal anecdotes to share about the Dashes, feel free to appropriate mine. But lowercase dashes also provide hours of dinner conversation. Dashes, like table forks, come in different sizes, and there is a proper use for each. The handiest member of the dash family is the one-em dash. Think of it as the dinner fork, the one on the inside, which you use for your main dish. The em is a printer’s unit approximately the width of a capital letter M. We who grew up using typewriters learned to type two hyphens, with or without space on either side, to form a dash. Most word-processing programs automatically fuse double hyphens into a solid dash when you get to the end of the word following it—that is, the computer automatically compensates for old-fashioned habits. There is also a one-en dash, the width of a capital N. That would be your salad fork. Some clever writers type two one-ens instead of two hyphens to form the long dash, and it looks good, but it’s brittle: if it falls on a line break, it snaps in half.
The en dash works more like a hyphen than like a dash, connecting compound words, such as the New York–New Haven Railroad. Many publications use the en dash when just one of the items is compound, like Minneapolis–St. Paul instead of Minneapolis-St. Paul (Minneapolitans might prefer that St. Paul not be mentioned at all), and some use it to relieve hyphen congestion, in a phrase such as “chocolate-chocolate-chip–ice-cream cone.” I find this awkward, as if one leg were longer than the other. The Chicago Manual of Style considered doing away with the one-en dash, but has let it linger. It’s useful in scores (22–1) and dates (1978–89), though it is not strictly necessary in either. A simple hyphen would do.
A sentence with its hyphens and its dashes of the proper length in their proper places is a great relief.
Before:
At the bar, flavor infused vodka –called aquavit – is another high point of the dining experience.
After:
At the bar, flavor-infused vodka—called aquavit—is another high point of the dining experience.
Think of all the uses of the dash:
—It can stand at the head of a line to indicate an item in a list.
—It can be deployed like a colon—it introduces an amplification of what has come before.
—It can be employed in pairs within a sentence—like the comma—and is subject to some of the same rules as the comma.
—It can be used instead of quotation marks to set off dialogue.
—Who does he think he is, James Joyce?