Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians
Submit a question for the next column.
Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into
Hyphens are endangered. This is not necessarily bad. Perhaps even The New Yorker will soon shake off a few of its hyphenated habits—just the most antiquated ones. I like hyphens very much myself, and would never advocate their complete extinction! But you know, dear copy dept., that "life-style" and "sound-track" just don't work anymore, especially in quotations from spangly modern sources. Do they still do "teen-ager"? Yes, it appears they do. Any other hyphenated dinosaurs you can think of? Again, this is not a general railing against "that copy dept. at The New Yorker, why is it stuck in the past?" I like many of its quirks, although, as you know, I take exception to British spellings. (And I'm half-Canadian!) I just think that you can't talk about the "sound-track" to an Apatow or Cronenberg film, or the "life-style" of Jay-Z, or the "teen-agers" in Kids. Don't you?
Who we?
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.
We welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
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)
Tell me more
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.
Primary sources
The New Yorker
Events listed by the magazine
Web resources: New Yorker writers and artists
Books, Organizations, &c.
Edited by Martin Schneider, designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
The Rossosphere
- Resistance Is Fertile
- Mick Stevens: I Really Should Be Drawing
- Cartoonist Michael Maslin's homepage
- Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
- Sasha Frere-Jones
- Matthew Diffee's HuffPo blog
- The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s
- The essential Jane Grant
- Paul Noth's Pale Force
- The New York Public Library records
- New Yorker Comment
- Chiasmus in The New Yorker
- Wikipedia: The New Yorker
- New Yorker database
- The New Orcer
- Silence of the City
- Between the Squibs
- Blog About Town
- Newyorkette
- New Yorker Anti-Caption Contest
- The New Yorker Forums
- I Hate the New Yorker
- Ben Yagoda's homepage
- Access My Library
- New Yorker haiku
- Modern Spectator
- Map: Caption Contest Winners
- Technorati: New Yorker
- Link to suggest? Email it!
Comments
But are they really endangered? Check this out...http://blog.oup.com/2007/09/hyphens/.
I always found it disconcerting that the New Yorker wrote "Vice-President."
I would have also been interested in Oxford's take on hyphenating prefixes. Our general rule where I work is that they are run in, except when it looks odd or hard to read, but as time goes by I find that more and more look better to me hyphenated, espcially with "co-". (Is that right, to put the period outside the quote in this instance? I like it.) But it might just come of looking too hard at the words....
Oh, but my outside period (outside-period?) gambit was sabotaged by the "smart" quotes (they appear straight when you're typing in).
hyphens are nice... sadly, when writing, i tend to make them look pretty... thus, they appear more like this: ~
i look at them like new york apartment furniture; they should be functional and attractive.
I believe there needs to be an official probationary period, after which a word moves from hyphenated compound word to closed compound word. My recommendation is two years, tops, in the MW Dictionary. It's time words like "by-product" and "fund-raising" were officially hitched.
The definitive practitioner of unnecessary hyphen use is T. Herman Zweibel, age-besotted plutocrat, iron lung captive, and publisher of The Onion.
General over-view:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Herman_Zweibel
On-line archive of his news-paper columns:
http://www.theonion.com/content/taxonomy/tag/T._Herman_Zweibel
Ben: I was not aware of THZ's hyphen-o-mania -- very funny! I would wager that many of them were in common use at some point.