Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [43]
He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.
Byron, Don Juan, 1818–20
Let love therefore be what it will, – my uncle Toby fell into it.
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1760–67
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson,
“Because I could not stop for Death”, 1863
The dash is nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar, partly because overtly disorganised thought is the mode of most email and (mobile phone) text communication, and the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for all other punctuation marks. “I saw Jim – he looked gr8 – have you seen him – what time is the thing 2morrow – C U there.” Why is the dash the mark à la mode? Because it is so easy to use, perhaps; and because it is hard to use wrongly; but also because it is, simply, easy to see. Full stops and commas are often quite tiny in modern typefaces, whereas the handsome horizontal dash is a lot harder to miss. However, just as the exclamation mark used to be persona non grata on old typewriter keyboards, so you may often hunt in vain for the dash nowadays: on my own Apple keyboard I have been for years discouraged from any stream-of-consciousness writing by the belief that I had to make my own quasi-dashes from illicit double-taps on the hyphen. When I discovered a week ago that I could make a true dash by employing the alt key with the hyphen, it was truly one of the red-letter days of my life. Meanwhile, the distinction between the big bold dash and its little brother the hyphen is evidently blurring these days, and requires explanation. Whereas a dash is generally concerned to connect (or separate) phrases and sentences, the tiny tricksy hyphen (used above in such phrases as “quasi-dashes”, “double-taps” and “stream-of-consciousness”) is used quite distinctly to connect (or separate) individual words.
Are dashes intrinsically unserious? Certainly in abundance they suggest baroque and hyperactive silliness, as exemplified by the breathless Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma:
“How do you do? How do you all do? – Quite well, I am much obliged to you. Never better. – Don’t I hear another carriage? – Who can this be? – very likely the worthy Coles. – Upon my word, this is charming to be standing about among such friends! And such a noble fire! – I am quite roasted.”
Yet the dash need not be silly. The word has identical roots with the verb “to dash” (deriving from the Middle English verb dasshen, meaning “to knock, to hurl, to break”) and the point is that a single dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for bathos, for shock. “Wait for it,” the single dash seems to whisper, with a twinkle if you’re lucky. Byron is a great master of the dramatic dash:
A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering “I will ne’er consent” –
consented.
A comma just wouldn’t cut the mustard there, especially with the metre hurrying you along. Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary penchant for dashes has been said to be a mirror into her own synapses, symbolising “the analogical leaps and flashes of advanced cognition” – either that, of course, or she used a typewriter from which all the other punctuation keys had been sadistically removed.
Double dashes are another matter. These are a bracketing device, and the only issue is when to use brackets, when dashes. The differences can be quite subtle, but compare these two:
He was (I still can’t believe this!) trying to climb in the window.
He was – I still can’t believe this! – trying to climb in the window.
Is one version preferable to the other? Reading both aloud, it would be hard to tell them