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Looked Into
The Hyphen Is Deceitful Above All Things
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: Hendrik Hertzberg, politics, punctuation, TOTT
From Hendrik Hertzberg's amusing Talk of the Town about Cheney-haters and the stalwarts who love him:
Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.
And from Slate 's review of the new FX show about "race-swapping":
If Black. White.—the title of which is annoyingly punctuated, by the way—were a drama, the network would be sending producers' notes about Bruno's lack of character development.
I'd like lots more of this sort of journalism; I could talk about hyphens and annoying punctuation all day.
Which reminds me, I've gotten some letters about the magazine's dogged allegiance to spelling certain words as though we were not in New Amsterdam but in Olde England. I've started a collection (a list, that is, not a bucket of quarters for the copy dept.'s re-brainwashing), so send them in if you see them.
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Emdashes, founded December 2004, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.
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This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.
A few clips
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
- Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
- Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
- Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
- Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
- Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
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They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.
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Comments
The New Yorker spells teenager this way: teen-ager. Even Jimmy Dean wouldn't have used a hyphen.
Yes! That's one of them, and they always baffle me. That one's from some kind of prelapsarian Past, and not even England. Did Tina Brown bring in the spellings? Why didn't they throw them out with her corner-office aspidistras? Or have they been there forever? Obviously this is a case for The Complete New Yorker and its observers. It's strange, even to me, that I would complain about British and old-fashioned spellings--I have affinities for both vocabularies, but "centimetres"? Come on! I'm not alone in this view.