The Grammarnator, serving this week as the Punctuationator, respectfully requests that The Insider (yes, he still likes the titles of newspapers in italics) consider distinguishing between the hyphen and the dash. The occasion for this request appeared in the historical vignettes about Richard Potter in the Airport Issue: “The bear would rush up to the tree, thrust both paws into the nest, and then, covered with wasps-paws, head and ears-he would retreat a rod or two, uttering the most painful shrieks.”
When he first read this, he wondered what on earth “wasps-paws” were, and only when he got to “ears-he” (the Grammarnator is slowing with age and tends to read one word a time) did he realize where the problem lay. To quote from Diana Hacker's Pocket Style Manual, one of several guides lying around his house (the Grammarnator can hardly wait for the next lie-lay error): “The dash may be used to set off material that deserves special emphasis. When typing, use two hypens to form a dash ( – ), with no spaces before or after them. (If your word processing program has what is known as an 'em-dash,' you may use it instead, with no space before or after it.”
Following this advice, the offending sentence would look thus: “The bear would rush up to the tree, thrust both paws into the nest, and then, covered with wasps – paws, head and ears – he would retreat a rod or two, uttering the most painful shrieks.”
Curiously, Hacker's five examples all seem to have spaces before and after the dash, and so do the examples in Mr. John E. Warriner's English Grammar and Composition: Complete Course, which was the grammatical Bible of the Grammarnator's youth. The spaces would produce what undoubtedly strikes many as the clearest and most elegant format: “The bear would rush up to the tree, thrust both paws into the nest, and then, covered with wasps – paws, head and ears – he would retreat a rod or two, uttering the most painful shrieks.” The emphasis on each separate part enclosed within the dashes is now strikingly set off from the flow of the sentence, exactly the effect desired.
