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Oh this is easy. m dash: -- n dash: -. .. I take it few people find morse code puns funny anymore. Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. What does h
by IIAOPSW 4y ago
Oh this is easy.
m dash: --
n dash: -.
.. I take it few people find morse code puns funny anymore.
Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. What does having 3 basically identical characters add to the language other than a pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over. We've all been using - just fine. On what basis does the person writing this article believe these rules matter, are important, disambiguate language?
Call me a hopeless philistine, but I say down with the dash. One symbol is fine for word-compounding, numerical ranges, subtraction, mid word line breaks. No one needs an em dash to tell them pages 3-8 is not a compound word.
- 6th 4y agoI_for⁃one−do–not-care—what--line-thing-ies–areｰused&∴I༌wish‑goodluck to those·that·care.¶
- frizlab 4y agoAn example from the article: Looks good: “Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.” Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money-rather than for art or pleasure-is really quite enjoyable.” Yes, punctation does matter. (In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually.)
- askvictor 4y agoI disagree that the first example looks good. Both cases would be better with spaces, which kind of renders the em dash unnecessary.
- ghaff 4y agoSome places I write for use the em-dash with spaces and some without. I try to remember which is which but I often forget.
- 83457 4y agoI just use commas or parens.
- jameshart 4y agoHaving multiple options for how to offset parenthetical asides, far from being redundant (or even confusing), offers us—as writers and readers—more opportunities to express the tonal variations (or nuances) that we would – in spoken language – communicate through our voice and body language; moreover it lets us vary the visual, aesthetic quality of our prose – which is as much a part of the experience of reading as comprehension is.
- wholinator2 4y agoIs this a written excerpt from a text book or something? This single sentence makes more sense than many of the arguments I've seen previously.
- jameshart 4y agoNah, it’s just a deliberate hodge-podge of a sentence where I threw in every subclause I could to try to illustrate the point.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoThe "unreadable" sample is very much readable. We can all read it. No one is tripping up trying to figure out what a "money-rather" is.
- floodle 4y agoNot for me. It's readable, but my brain has to do more work. When I get to "money-rather" my brain trips up slightly, and then I'm confused until the next dash, then I go back and figure it out. All possible and dealt with in under a second, but in the first example with the longer dash my brain recognises a parenthesis and I take a little "breath pause" before carrying on.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoAlso consider, that eye movement is not always linear from left to right. But I agree, brain has to do more work and it is slightly confusing.
- OGWhales 4y agoI can read it, but it definitely trips me up.
- yardstick 4y agoJust add spaces. Sorted. “Sometimes writing for money - rather than for art or pleasure - is really quite enjoyable.”
- kimburgess 4y agoEn space, em space, three-per-em space, four-per-em space, six-per-em space, figure space, punctuation space, thin space, hair space, ideographic space, or Ogham space?
- alpaca128 4y agoI have written and read text for decades without knowing the difference between those, so whatever space one gets when pressing the spacebar seems to do the job just fine. And if in doubt LaTeX etc will handle the rest well enough if I care about sub-pixel precision of some margins.
- knert 4y agoThis is what I do. I don’t see the problem here. I don’t see the need to adopt additional characters.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoIt's a tradition from hand-set paper print which is now largely obsolete.
- greenicon 4y agoIn German that’s the way it’s done: en-dash with spaces, em-dashes (basically) don’t exist.
- atoav 4y agoI use em dashes with spaces in German (and English) all the time — I just like it better and don't care about arbitrary rules and traditions.
- dmm10 4y agoOthers have mentioned using spaces with an en-dash or hyphen instead of an em-dash. Having used a typewriter -back in the day- I learned to produce text like this. How I learned the Unreadable: “Sometimes writing for money -rather than for art or pleasure- is really quite enjoyable.” To the teacher I learned from this was a standard way of punctuating on a typewriter.
- ghaff 4y agoI use em-dashes and parentheses somewhat differently but you can mostly substitute the latter for the former.
- seszett 4y ago> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually. The only French-speaking place I've seen em-dashes used in daily life was Québec. For some (good) reason, it seems administration took a lot of care in using correct typography. My voting district for example was Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (the first dash being an en-dash, and the second one a hyphen) and I was always amazed at how all communication actually used these two different dashes. I can't imagine this level of care in French or Belgian official communication.
- wlonkly 4y ago(By way of explanation, the parent commenter's voting district covered the Mercier and the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhoods.)
- miramba 4y agoIt‘s not unreadable, just a tad more difficult. And as others have pointed out, there are other ways of making it easier again than using a specific character. But the real point is: The information transported in both examples did not change its meaning and will be understood by the reader / receiver in both cases. If it‘s not, it matters. As long as it is, it‘s pedantic.
- dsego 4y agoRight, the dash length seems more of an aesthetic choice, like a drop cap or something.
- biztos 4y agoLooks better: “Sometimes writing for money — rather than for art or pleasure — is really quite enjoyable.” Punctuation matters, but space -- the "zeroth punctuation mark" -- matters more! The author does discuss spacing the dashes but is, given the overall point of the article, surprisingly noncommittal.
- ehsankia 4y agoWouldn't the alternative rather be to use commas there, not a hyphen? "Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable." In your head, do you read those differently?
- jameshart 4y agoPersonally, I think this sentence would benefit from a comma before the ‘or’. And in that case we could probably benefit from a clearer way of setting aside the parenthetical. “Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.” – this seems awkward to me. This version, though: “Sometimes writing for money—rather than for art, or pleasure—is really quite enjoyable.” Isn’t that more fluid?
- noizejoy 4y ago> “Sometimes writing for money, rather than for art, or pleasure, is really quite enjoyable.” I think that changes the meaning, since it’s now a list of 3 items with an Oxford comma, rather than two lists, with the first list having 1 item, and the second list having 2 items. And I’m having a rough time even making sense of such revised meaning. Expressed as pseudo-code, I read the original intent of that sentence as: “money and not(art or pleasure) == enjoyable” and that can be broken into “((money and not art) or (money and not pleasure)) == enjoyable
- lencastre 4y agoAlso in Portugal, just use parenthesis (like when you would insert an idea into a sentence) and it still reads fine.
- nephanth 4y ago> In French the em-dash is almost inexistant; we use parenthesis instead usually. French uses em-dashes ("tiret cadratin") or en-dashes ("tiret semi-cadratin") for dialogue. Like so: – bonjour, dit-elle, comment allez vous? – bonsoir, repondit-on. Ça va ça vient, et vous? – bien
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 4y agoArguably there's a place for both an em-dash and a hyphen. (For your example, a hyphen would be pretty normal style anyway.) But in a world where double quotes is a massively overloaded punctuation mark we probably don't need an en-dash at least.
- mannykannot 4y agoThe article is not actually very pedantic - at one point, the author encourages us to break the rules - and I feel it has been offered in the sense of "printers have developed these variations on the basic dash, and if you choose to use them, it is probably best to use them in the same sense as printers themselves do."
- gnull 4y agoReminds me of this guy I met at a CTF. He decided that punctuation generally is unnecessary. What's the use of having so many different symbols if the only thing they denote is pauses between words. so when he wrote something . he used only periods to denote pauses . no other punctuation symbols . no capital letters . some people were thinking that his periods stand for perl concatenation operators . i dont know if he is still doing this . i hope he stopped
- 6th 4y agoProbably scored a. sweet gig. writing lines. for. Captain. Kirk.
- dredmorbius 4y agoWriting is a recorded symbolic convention for the benefit of the sufficiently educated reader. Eschewingallpunctuationforscriptocontinuaisofcourseppossiblethoughitishelltoread.Itisevendifficulttotypewithoutaddingthespacesreflexivelyifindasipostthis. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua> There's a reason monks of old read aloud. It was about the only way to confirm the actual meaning of a text.
- c22 4y agoUcnevndrpsmevwlsandstllmkesmthgrdblbutbrly.
- dredmorbius 4y agobrylrnr'ydnsdrwkcbttrwdnslwvhtprD (Bass-ackwards hint: "Arabic" expresses poorly when vowels are excluded.)
- sundarurfriend 4y agoactually i kinda love that . punctuation is semi arbitrary anyway . and this is actually much easier to read than the usual literary english full of semicolons and dashes . mimics speech much better too .
- dredmorbius 4y agoIn several significant computer typography systems, the notation for an en dash is a doubled hyphen (--), and for an em dash a tripled one (---). Notably LaTeX and Markdown (Pandoc flavoured: <https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html>).
- bee_rider 4y agoIn LaTeX I’ve been using \textemdash instead. I don’t actually know why, just, usually these sort of longer names tend to have some niche edge case they handle better. em-dashes and parenthetical should be used sparingly so it isn’t too annoying to do all the extra typing.
- dredmorbius 4y agoMy preference is for spare markup where at all possible. Less typing, less mental overhead, clearer source text. If it's necessary to be explicit for clarity and proper rendering, then sure. But otherwise, the less friction the better. After years of procrastinating in learning LaTeX (the Lion Book turned out to be a clear, delightful, and highly useful reference), one of the pleasant surprises was that paragraphs are simply denoted by two carriage returns. After years of hand-coding HTML where matching <p> and </p> tags (among many others) was a constant occupational hazard, this was just ... pleasing. Markdown has a similar philosophy, if a far more restricted set of capabilities. That set is however sufficient for a tremendous number documents, and if it's ultimately insufficient still remains a useful way to get started with writing.
- teo_zero 4y agoProbably you know this, but you don't actually need to close every <p> with a </p>.
- dredmorbius 4y agoI've been through enough different HTML variants whilst not having to adhere strictly to standards that I'm moderately fuzzy what the current state of the standard is. I hear the current standard is also ... large.[1] But even if it's not strictly necessary to balance <p> tags ... it is necessary to do so with many other HTML elements, and missing or mis-typed tags can utterly bork a page, particularly if there's any complexity to it. (Hand-crafting tends to minimise that complexity, but it's still possible to get reasonably twisted.) That said, checking one of my favourite HTML5 references, whose page source itself is a beautiful example of clean HTML ... I see that Mark Pilgrim in fact omits the close tags on his paragraphs: <view-source:http://diveintohtml5.info/introduction.html http://diveintohtml5.info/introduction.html> And that said: LaTeX and Markdown also omit the need for the opening paragraph tag. So there's that. Still, fair point ;-) ________________________________ Notes: 1. Drew DeVault has suggested as much: <https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....>
- greggyb 4y agoOf course, we do use compound numbers in English. A very common example is in threads for machined screw threads, e.g., 1/4-20. This is not a range of numbers spanning from 0.25 to 20.0, but rather a pair of numbers that define two metrics of a single thing, which combine to uniquely identify the thread. Perhaps context is sufficient, but adding this to your examples gives us at least three scenarios where the single symbol would mean very different things with pairs of numbers: compounding, subtraction, and numerical ranges. If we add on the clause separation duties of the dashes mentioned in the article, we have four uses where a single symbol sits between two numbers and means entirely different things.
- thfuran 4y agoBut apparently only insufferable pedants care about clarity. That's why we should stop using those pointless number glyphs too and just write them out in unary using hyphens. -/------------------------- is just fine.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago.... -.-- .--. .... . -. ... .- -. -.. .--. . .-. .. --- -.. .. ... .- .-.. .-.. .. -. . . -..
- IIAOPSW 4y agoThere's no shortage of mathematical notation and delimiting characters. Eg you could write your machine screws as .25+20i. Obviously you raise e to the power of your screw and you get a rotation rate in the complex plane, and a width of screw in the complex plane as well. Compounding and numerical ops are basically never confused. Machine screw is the only one of these where its even plausible. Not that subtraction and range are ever ambiguous, but if they were just use "#1 - #n" to denote "the numbers 1/n being used as labels for some range of options, not as a numerical values". All in all, we have plenty of characters. A minimal set of rules, minimal set of characters, rich in predictable patterns, is what makes for a good language. The existence of a whole slew of specialized characters, all basically indistinguishable and frankly unheard of to most, has to work hard to justify itself right to live on my keyboard. We have parenthesis, commas, colons both full and partial, brackets square and curvy, braces, slashes forward and back...More than enough permutations and code space for anyone's expressive needs. Why anyone would opt for more byzantine characters with more rules on top is beyond my imagination.
- eurasiantiger 4y agoThe em dash is syntactic sugar for a brief digression in discourse.
- dingbing 4y ago> pointless rules for insufferable pedants to power trip over The perfect topic for HN!
- Helmut10001 4y agoDepending on the audience, I think the article is justified and gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers, where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is definitly worth the effort.
- pas 4y ago... with all due respect to folks who choose the hard and extremely frustrating academic career path, the inefficiency is so absurd that it truly only can exist in these gigantic institution-sized machines. (And in similar sized corporate money-makers.) Most papers are fundamentally flawed, unfortunately, due to lacking sufficient information and data for replication, being underpowered (and not controlling for many factors). It took decades to get to some minimally sensible standards (preregistration, conflict of interest declarations, awareness of the most common stats issues, power analysis), but we're still far from doing effective science. Money is still handed out based on feels, hypes, name recognition (when it's not blinded) for laughably small projects, instead of focusing on establishing longer term ones and/or improving the actual science output (ie. data and hypothesis generation) of existing ones. (Yes, of course, academia approximates this. Yes, yes. Everything's fine. We'll have a usable model of Alzheimer's any second now! Aaany second. Just let this new totally effective model of depression/obesity/learning/ME-CFS out of the door first.)
- golemotron 4y agoWithout the pedantry, things can devolve to violence. Panda bears with machine guns. Horrible stuff. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title
- paulcole 4y agoIt reminds me of the strong feelings about Comic Sans. The guy who created it said something like, “If you love Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby. And if you hate Comic Sans you don’t know much about typography and should probably get a new hobby.” I feel the same about this. The average person has about a billion things to improve in their writing before the “correct” use of different dashes should become something they think about.
- krsdcbl 4y agoI strongly disagree. By the same logic you might as well say: "why are we even kerning fonts, who cares if there's a few gaps when i write »irl«." The fact that using different dashes does encode meaning in a subtle sense does have relevance for semantics -- but that's, imho, almost secondary to this argument, as it's not as grammatically relevant as commas and. periods, for example. The primary importance of using the correct dashes is that it preserves a good flow for reading and is paramount to micro-typographic balance: - A longer dash to link words that belong together is visually perceived as an interruption and doesn't feel like those two words are one - In reverse, a shorter dash when switching context -- or interjecting another idea within a sentence -- doesn't slow the pace of the text flow enough, and your brain will read/intonate it the same way as when linking words. - And at last, either of them won't preserve optical balance when displaying a numerical range, as numbers are wider than a hyphen, but narrower than an em space, which would result in either insufficient visual separation compared to spaces following said numbers, or too much of an optical gap within an entity that belongs together. That's the barebones set of dashes that are relevant for a balanced typographical appearance, not made up pedantic complexity to annoy people. Otherwise we'd be taking about half and quarter em dashes and the likes.
- mock-possum 4y agoIt also looks like you’re drawing attention to something — the use of the double dashes — in making a deliberate choice to break from the norm. Whereas if you just follow the way most people use dashes - single dashes, not double - then it doesn’t really stand out, it just looks ‘normal.’ You’re used to seeing it styled that way. It feels different.
- akho 4y agoYour message is somehow undermined by your use of “--” in place of “—”.
- mock-possum 4y agoDid you know double dash is treated as one single longer than normal dash by default in iOS? This character ‘—‘ looks like one long dash to me, even though I typed the dash button twice. What’s even crazier is if I type four dashes ‘——‘ it still looks like one even longer dash; even six ‘———‘ is a solid line, and I can delete it by pressing the backspace button once I have no idea how to get my phone to display two short dashes side by side: ‘--‘ maybe I can fake it by puttin an emoji in between, knowing that hackernews will filter it out. Let’s see what happens. Edit - ooh that totally works. I’d never really paid attention to how this feature worked before.
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoagree. why many word when few do trick
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- the_third_wave 4y ago...and when the discussion on whether to use [mnxyz+]-dashes has finally been sorted we can start on which font to use to render these dashes, whether they should be proportionally rendered, how to handle ligatures with dashes, to RGBA or not to RGBA dashes, hinted dashes versus unhinted dashes, the big difference between the visually identical dashes in language A versus language B, et ce.te.ra.
- virtualritz 4y agoTLDR; Using the right dashes is about the UX of text. If you don't care about UX of the reader your points are sound. I however--as a typographer--strongly disagree. Typograpy is both about beautiful typesetting as well as making sure that the information contained in the text is understood easily. The former is obvious to me. It may not be to you but that doesn't make your reasoning right. As an analogy, there are quite a few people among my friends & acquaintances who cook occasionally or rarely. They usually share the trait that they care more about eating than how something tastes. Bluntly spoken. They commonly have one kind of oil in their kitchen (most often suflower) and they use it when the recipe demands "oil". Usually recipes specify what oil to use. It may say olive oil or peanut oil or sesame oil. They won't have these oils and they don't care. Even though the effect of using a different oil is profound on many levels (not even only taste). If you care, that is. Same with the dashes. Text looks and reads very different when those different dashes are used correctly. Which leads to the information part. Why do we have these different dashes? They actually map to spoken language. A hypen is used to pull things together. A word can be hypenated (should be read as if the hypen didn't exist) or two words can be pulled together (making the pause between them shorter) "ever-changing" is pronounced differently than "ever changing". An en dash used between points in time or space conveys that. A distance. The spoken pause is usually longer. And finally, an em dash, like a comma, conveys an even longer pause between the words it separates.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI must say, truth is an absolute defense, and I'm certainly one to both value calories down the gullet crude and efficiently, and to not be terribly aware of what goes on in the font fetishizing circles (no disrespect). But I do understand information coding and that obsession over a good design. For me, its been subways and metros. I've been doing redesigns, obsessive recoloring, obsessively flipping between colors and shapes and other markers in an attempt to compress all that information down to the entropy limit. So I get it. I just don't get it with typography. Its all just letters to my viewing. Once the physical squiggle has been recognized for the abstract symbol it represents, the symbol and not the squiggle is all I remember seeing. I honestly couldn't tell you the last font I ever looked at, let alone if it had serifs or [insert typography feature, no really thats the full extent I know]. I can't say I'd ever noticed (or benefited from) a distinction between dash length. Any component of a letter under a certain length scale I mentally dismiss as likely printing dirt anyway. If it works for other people, well great and mad respect for it. So I get it. visual design language serves a purpose. An important purpose. Its not the artful navel gazing outsiders think it is. Well, maybe some people are like that, but there really is objective purpose under it all. I'd even say I agree about rules for hyphens touching their neighbors or not. For compound words it should be a train-like-in-construction whereas in a delimiter roll like range of items it should go Boston - DC. I just can't see having a whole dedicated set of minutely different characters fit for this purpose. I dislike it for the same reason I dislike lego sets that have a particular piece in them which isn't used for anything else in any other set and never will be. It ruins the elegance of the system. It offloads a minor design problem onto somewhere it doesn't belong (namely the character set). I want to know everything while learning as little as possible. Which is why I strive for encodings that express as much as they can with as few elements as possible. If it were me, I'd just have '.' , '-' and '_' exist at mid, bottom and top heights and be done with it. Don't like my line length? make it whatever length you want either dotted dashed or continuous. Solves every use case, extremely composable, every permutation that should logically be there, is there. .,;:' notice anything incomplete? LHTIFE notice whats missing? qbhrnujdp damn that's frustrating. KRBPF where's the rest of the set?
- karmakaze 4y agoI know the correct usages but often avoid them as it doesn't confuse the reader, but can break copy/paste usage. I can get by with ASCII hyphen/dash and double-dash for em-dash. I particularly dislike autocorrection of punctuation into more pleasing forms (e.g. smart quotes/apostrophes). This is one reason I tend to do outlining in Github issues more often than G.Docs. Of course I'm mostly writing about computer/software topics and don't write for publications or a non-technical audience.
- trmsw 4y agoAgreed! Plus with my handwriting, who's ever going to be able to tell the difference?
- moffkalast 4y agoHandwriting? We don't do that here.
- karaterobot 4y ago> Seriously, what's the point of this pedantry. My takeaway wasn't that the article was being pedantic, just that it was being informative. What's the point of punctuation? The point is that ambiguity exists in human communication. Where accuracy and precision are important — for example in formal communication — different punctuation marks and rules help prevent misunderstandings. When engaged in less formal communication, or when the stakes of miscommunication are lower, these rules seem (as you observe) unnecessary. I think that insisting on proper syntax, spelling, grammar, or whatever else in an online forum like HN would be silly. But, internet forums aren't the entire world, and it is conceivable to me that there may be places where people need to depend on the meaning of their message being conveyed reliably.
- irrational 4y agoI agree. I’m usually a stickler for punctuation and spelling, but I can barely tell the difference between these three hyphens. And that is when they are right next to each other. If they were alone in a document? There is no way I could know which is being used. If they aren’t easily distinguishable, I don’t see the point in using three separate symbols.
- lwhi 4y agoWe have nice things that are free to use—I think we should use them. There are different contextual requirements that can be served by specific typographic characters. I'd much rather see them used, than not. I'd imagine most would feel the same‽