A Word, Please: Called to task by an en dash advocate

Hillary Clinton can survive an email scandal. Donald Trump can survive a head-on collision with a cotton-candy machine. Carly Fiorina can survive Donald Trump.

Lightweights.

Sure, these pols may seem resilient within the confines of the cushy, coddling world of presidential politics. But none of them would last a day in a truly brutal battleground: the world of language.

In politics, you can use words like “stupid” and “misunderestimate” and “tithe” and still be standing. In my world, you can’t even use the word “dash.”

I know. I did it. In this column recently, I talked about how it doesn’t matter whether you put spaces around a dash. Some editing styles say you should, others say you shouldn’t. So you can write them either way.

Big mistake. My error wasn’t what I said about the dash. That’s true. It can have spaces around it or can touch the word on either side. My crime was that I used the word “dash.” I should have said, as I’ve since been instructed via email, “em dash.”

Never heard of an “em dash”? It’s what you probably call a dash. But the “em” part is useful for distinguishing it from something practically no one has heard of: the en dash.

An em dash (or as I call it, a dash) is the width of two hyphens. An en dash is shorter than an em dash but longer than a hyphen. An em dash is sentence punctuation. It separates ideas and organizes words and thoughts. An en dash is more like a hyphen in that it physically connects letters and numbers into a single term. But it’s different from a hyphen because it has specialized jobs.

The most important difference between the em dash and the en dash is that, in much of the publishing word, en dashes don’t exist at all.

The hugely influential Associated Press style doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the en dash. Nor do some other popular editing styles. Instead, the en dash exists mainly in Chicago editing style, which is followed by most book publishers.

Here’s a quick overview of how the Chicago manual says to use the en dash.

First, think of it as sort of an uber-hyphen. A hyphen connects words with other words or prefixes, as in good-looking and co-opt. An en dash does the same thing, only instead of connecting regular words, it attaches bigger, unwieldy things like two-word proper nouns.

Imagine you want to talk about something that happened before World War II. In AP style, you could use a hyphen to put “pre-” in front of the whole term: pre-World War II. In Chicago style, you’d use the slightly longer en dash the same way. It just looks a little better because “pre” isn’t quite so close to “World.”

En dashes also connect things that already have their own hyphens: “a semi-private-semi-public entity” would have an en dash right in the middle, between semi-private and semi-public, which themselves have plain-old hyphens. With an en dash it’s clear that you’re hooking up two hyphenated terms rather than creating one long hyphenated term.

En dashes can also work in ranges and time spans, like when you’re talking about the time between 2002 and 2008.

Here, an en dash can stand in for the word “to,” “through,” or “until.” The same is true for spans of hours, like nine to five, age ranges, dates, sports scores and stuff like that. But for that job, the en dash is most useful in tables and graphic elements. In running text, many experts agree, you’re often better off using real words like “to” or “through.”

As further testament to the obscurity of the poor en dash, this punctuation mark is pretty hard to find on your computer. In my edition of Microsoft Word, you find the en dash by selecting “Insert,” then “Symbol,” then “More symbols” then “Special Characters.”

Or, if you’d rather, you can do as I do and simply forget that the en dash even exists.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.