Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

I've just completed what is hopefully the last big edit of my book about tuberculosis, and in the process, I've been reminded how much is contained within a dash. God, I love dashes. I love hyphens. I love en dashes. I love em dashes. I don't love them as much as Emily Dickinson loved them, but I love them.

And like a lot of things, the deeper you dig into dashes, the more interesting they become. And that's the first thing I find interesting about dashes—they didn't really exist before printing. By the way, I just used an em dash. I could have used a semicolon or a colon, but I used an em dash because I prefer them. Which reminds me, there are two major kinds of dashes, em and en.

An em dash has all kinds of utilities. One might use it in lieu of a colon, or a semicolon, as I just did. Or you might use it in poetry, as Emily Dickinson famously liked to, over and over and over again. Or one might use them to indicate an interruption in thought or action, as Shakespeare's printers did. Or they can also be used in lieu of a parenthesis. So, for example, in my book about tuberculosis, I might write, “And so even now, tuberculosis—a disease that has been curable for nearly a century—kills over 1.3 million people per year.” Now, I could have inserted that clause into parentheses like this, and that would have also been correct, just as it's also correct to use a colon in a situation like the one I mentioned earlier. And listen, I'm not afraid of colons or parenthetical asides. It's just that I think em dashes often look and work better, for whatever reason. It's like a personal preference thing.

In fact, looking at preferences for em dashes or parentheses is one way software identifies the author of anonymously published texts. Now, Hank, I am highly inclined toward em dashes. By last count, my most recent manuscript contained 313 of them. There's just so much an em dash can accomplish. It's a breath. It's a change of pace. It's an aside.

Now, Jonathan Swift made fun of em dashes back in the 18th century, writing that, “In modern Wit all printed Trash, is Set off with num’rous Breaks—and Dashes—” But, like, I am a modern wit printing trash, and I, for one, love my dashes.

The en dash is a rarer and more beautiful beast. It's longer than a hyphen, but half the length of an em dash. It's a kind of in-between dash employed only in highly specific circumstances. Like, if you want to say you worked at a place from 2022 to 2024, you would say 2022 en dash 2024. Now, most people will use hyphens in that situation, which is fine. Language doesn't exist to oppress us. It exists to promote the clarity of expression. But I use an en dash because, I don't know, I'm—I just—I love an en dash. Okay? You also technically use an en dash in other from/to situations. Like, if you're flying from New York to London, it's a New York en dash London flight. You better go to an AFC Wimbledon game while you're over there, or else what's even the point? You're gonna go to the Tate Modern and look at, like, the world's best 20th and 21st century art? Boring. By the way, that's 20th en dash 21st century art. But I don't think you need to use en dashes there. 

Like I said, the en dash's other use, however, called attributive compounds. I do think it makes sense there. Take, for example, the phrase New York–style pizza. If you read that with a hyphen, you might assume that there's something new about York style pizza. But with an en dash, you immediately realize that it's a multi-word phrase, New York en dash style pizza. Similarly, you might refer to war-era rationing, in which case you would use a hyphen between war and era. But if you're talking about Civil War–era rationing, then you would use an en dash between war and era, lest people conclude that the war era rationing was somehow civil. Do I realize that we're getting into the weeds here? Yes. Do I love it anyway? Yes. God, I love it so much when we're in the weeds of grammar. That is where I am happiest.

One of the things I love about writing is that every single choice can facilitate the clarity of expression or complicate it. Hank, I will see you on Friday—is a sentence that not even I can add an em dash to. Or can I?