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Oh, Taddle Creek, if I wasn’t already married….
Pity the poor en dash. Never has a piece of punctuation been so noble and yet so misunderstood at the same time. Back in the day, when typesetters ruled magazine design, the en dash had power; the en dash had cachet. Since the dawn of desktop publishing, however, it seems anyone who can click a mouse fancies himself a designer. Unfortunately, these would-be art directors know little of the history of typography and even less in the ways of properly typesetting a page. Ironically, they also know very little about their own computer keyboard and its nuances. As a result, age-old practices, such as the use of the en dash, a piece of punctuation not granted its own special key, have fallen by the wayside.
February 5, 2010 at 5:38 am
Hi Peter,
I’d forgotten this little typographical tool, which was part of my early job education as a typesetter. I don’t think I ever really understood its function since I was being taught by “back-shop boys” who had little interest in the rules of grammar and punctuation, only in the various ways they could intimidate the young neophyte who had stumbled into the job because she had learned to type in high school (It was the only skill I could trade on for employment in those days; the university degree I worked four years to obtain never actually led to a job of any kind). I believe the en was used in the classified ads, but my memory’s a little foggy on that. Once I left typesetting for the wider fields of journalism, the subject of en dashes never came up again. So who’s to blame for that? Perhaps it’s the fact I never worked for publications like The New Yorker or the NY Times. We did not have the luxury of writing in the kind of elegant style that might require the mighty en. Such a shame, but I’m glad to see champions like Taddler Creek, now that I finally understand the true function of this little scrap of type.
February 5, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Strangely, the only place I ever worked that cared about the en dash was Harlequin.