Dash It All!

Comparison of hyphens, minus sign, dashes, and underscore.

Here's a nice paean in the NYT by Ben Yagoda to one of my favorite punctuation marks - the dash. I admit to overusing it a bit, but sometimes it's the best way to reconcile disjointed thoughts or to emphasize a point without being exclamatory. Dashes can make the difference between a heartfelt statement versus a bland one. In his essay, Yagoda provides examples of quotes using dashes by famous authors, which could have been written with commas or semi-colons, but would lose a lot of feeling. The dashes elevate thoughts to loftier heights! He asserts that Emily Dickinson was the "Nobel Laureate" of this punctuation, though other writers such as Mark Twain, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also proponents. In reading more about the dash, I've learned that there are different kinds of dashes and these must not be confused with hyphens or the minus sign, which look and function differently. The most commonly used are the en and em dashes. The various dashes and their sizes and uses are described very thoroughly on Wikipedia. The em dash is often used to denote a break in thought - something I'm often known to do. It just feels right to break up sentences in this manner, so as to provide an aside or a bit of drama in exposition. So, try a dash sometimes - it's the right thing to do!

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The Irony Mark

 No, I'm not swearing! It just happens to be National Punctuation Day. It's a fairly new holiday, created in 2004 by Jeffrey Rubin, who wanted to encourage the proper usage of punctuation. And to the end, the New Yorker Magazine promotes a contest to see who can create the best new punctuation mark. See if you agree with their assessment of the winner. Also, in honor of this year's election, the National Punctuation Day website is holding its own election to see who can create the most highly punctuated paragraph. The contest also requires entrants to persuade the judges which punctuation mark should be the official punctuation mark of the President of the United States. Personally, my vote goes to the Irony Mark, probably the most appropriate mark of politics!

One Small Letter

One Small Step

Neil Armstrong's passing has re-invigorated the topic of whether he actually uttered the article 'a' in his famous sentence upon stepping on the moon. Everyone in the world heard him say, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Though Armstrong initially claimed he had used the article 'a'  before 'man,' he later conceded after hearing his recorded voice, that he had intended to say it, since grammatically it would make more sense in the context of the event. A few years ago, researchers studied the sound file of his [mis]quote and came to believe that there was a break in the file of several milliseconds.  And some scholars have even stated it might be simply an issue of dialect, that the 'a' might just have been combined with the 'for' as in 'fruh.' However, later analysis by other reseachers came to the conclusion that he simply misspoke. Snopes.com quotes Rick Houston, an Apollo historian, as refuting the claims that the 'a' was somehow garbled, stating it would be, "revisionist history" to believe so.

But whatever was said or intended to be said when Armstrong stepped on the moon, the discussion is dwarfed by the magnitude of the achievement of one human and all humankind. I for one will never forget the day the moon landing occurred as I watched it years ago as a child, riveted to the television with wonder and awe.

Interrobang?!

I always enjoy Ben Yagoda's occasional essays on language which he writes for the NYT. Yesterday's column on the overuse of the exclamation point was particularly entertaining. In it, he brought up a term that I was previously only vaguely familiar with: the interrobang. We've all seen its use in expressions using the combo question mark and exclamation point. As in, what the?!  And is there a difference between ?! and !? - apparently there is. Wikipedia, not surprisingly, has an entry on its history and development. Is there anything Wikipedia doesn't know?!
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Turquoise Salmon Sunset

Yesterday, saw this beautiful sunset in my neck of the woods. The photo here doesn't do it justice, but I can only describe it as one of those sunsets where the sky is an intense turquoise blue and the clouds a deep salmon pink (Alaskan, not Atlantic!). With most sunsets, the colors seem to meld together in various shades of red, orange, pink, a bit of blue. But this sunset seemed marked by only two distinct shades of turquoise and salmon - very startling!