You’ve probably noticed the Word Nymph has been in hibernation lately. Frankly, this spring hasn’t produced a fertile crop of linguistic irritants. And those peeking their heads above the soil haven’t seemed worthy of shining the sun upon (says she, ending her sentence acceptably with a preposition).
However, there has been one little allergen under my skin for some time; finally, it took a recent project for me to slap some Benedryl on it.
Like pollen in springtime, this one appears everywhere. Flyers, bulletins, invitations, ads, the posts of the most learned of Facebook friends.
“The show will air from 4:00-5:00 p.m.” “The dinner will be held from 6:00-9:00.” “The store will be open from 10-6.” In each of these examples, either something needs to go or something needs to be replaced. Do you see it?
The easiest fix would be to delete from, and say simply that the show will air 4:00-5:00 p.m. Alternatively, we could substitute the dash with to or until. The show will air from 4:00 until 5:00. Or we could say that the store is open between 10:00 and 6:00. But never—ever—should we use from and a dash.
Why is the from-dash so prevalent?
No matter. The subject springs from a conversation with a client last week about the correct way to punctuate ranges of dates and times. If a piece of punctuation is to indicate the time between Monday and Friday, is it a hyphen, an en dash or an em dash?
Typographically speaking, most authorities–the AP Stylebook, The Chicago Manual of Style and countless online sources–accept either a hyphen or an en dash. Preferring to save hyphens for hyphenation, I’d argue for the en dash. And while most authorities specify that there are to be no spaces on either side of en dash (unlike the mighty em dash, which prefers no space around it), there appears to be an exception for dates and times. Monday-Friday, 8:00-10 a.m. Or Tues.-Thurs., 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. And that’s little a, little p, with periods, by the way. The big A and big P are disappearing from modern temporal expression, and my eyes aren’t misting over their departure. (Apparently, Robert Bringhurst, the guru of modern typography, disagrees. Let’s postpone further discussion of that until I receive my copy of The Elements of Typographic Style.)
Nonetheless, I was tickled that my client cared as much about this wonky issue as I did and was especially psyched to back up my hunch with hard data. Most of all, I was proud that my client wasn’t the least bit tempted to pull a from-dash.
Happy Spring, which runs from March 20 to June 21.
For those who don’t recognize it by name, the em (as in the letter m, also used as a measurement of print space) dash is the longer of two kinds of dashes, formed in type by typing two consecutive dashes on the keyboard, without any space on either end. In most word processing programs, it doesn’t appear until you type a space after the word following the em dash. It’s fun; try it. (Brockaway cautions her readers to not do it this way; however, my attempt at her suggested computer command fails.)
Word Nymph 