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mauvehaus
ramshorns
My favourite example of this is using an en dash for a relationship between two separate things, rather than the more closely-connected compound adjective of a hyphen.
Italian–American relations: foreign relations between the governments of Italy and the United States. Italian-American relations: relatives who have moved from Italy to the United States.
dn3500
They don't mention it because the dash is dead. Check any major news web site, even the New York Times, and you'll find they often use the repulsive double hyphen in place of dash.
thekoma
The article has two Em dashes in the first paragraph. I believe haven't noticed the double hyphen anywhere. I know some word processors turn `--` to En dash and `---` to Em dash, so it might be a mix-up there.
dn3500
Can't find any in the NYT today, but here's one from CNN: https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_ff31bbc01931e2dcb21eea5d2b...
dboreham
Many applications will auto-correct, or typeset double dash to an En-dash. Perhaps they thought they were using such an editor?
valenaut
I always type -- for en dash. Usually text fields that accept markdown-like syntax will correct it, but I just leave it if they don't.
deltarholamda
>repulsive double hyphen
Why do you insult my Underwood? It has not harmed you.
tapia
But in this very article there are m-dashes.
deno
Article is about (very pedantic) orthography not typography. There are at least two em dashes used in the article but—that’s-(nevertheless)-completely–offtopic.
dboreham
Came here to say the same. Reduces the authority of the article imho.
zestyping
I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail".
It's electronic mail — just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader, e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-check, and so on. The lowercase "e-" prefix is broadly used and has a particular meaning.
The hyphen makes it read better, just like A-bomb, I-beam, O-ring, S-curve, U-turn, V-neck, or X-ray. Without the hyphen it looks like the stress should lean on the second syllable ("em-AIL"); "email" looks as awkward to read as "abomb", "ibeam", or "oring".
I know the ship has long since sailed on "e-mail". But to put it simply, it feels better to me.
yccs27
To me, the omission of the hyphen represents a change in attitude towards e(-)mail: from "e-mail" as the electronic version of standard mail, to email as a digital communication channel in its own right.
svat
Donald Knuth prefers "email" without the hyphen [1], according to his webpage which dates back to 1997 or earlier [2]:
> A note on email versus e-mail
> Newly coined nonce words of English are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write “non-zero” and “soft-ware” instead of “nonzero” and “software”; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling “e-mail”. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form “email” has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, “email” has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)
[1]: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...
johnday
I have some bad news for you about the common words "ebook" and "ecommerce", among others.
zestyping
Remember eeePC? They were so ahead of the curve.
staindk
I must be younger than you. Have always thought 'email' just looks and feels better... but you make good points!
Maybe it has something to do with frequency of use? "email"/"e-mail" must be used much more (and in more contexts - informal, formal, verbal, professional...) than the other examples you gave, so perhaps over time it was "slangified" and the hyphen dropped?
rosmax_1337
Further on the topic of how words change: In swedish, we have lots of english loan words in our everyday vocabulary. (To the great dismay of some!) This has lead to the creation of the word "mejl", which comes from the swedish way of pronouncing email, where the "ai"-sound easily becomes a "ej"-sound, and later this has accentuated the prounciation of the word more and more.
The word now is its own noun in our dictionary following the usual grammatical rules in swedish, for example:
mejl - e-mail mejlet - the e-mail mejla - sending e-mail
And it is also commonly used in compound words too. Like mejlkorg (e-mail bin), mejlkonversation (e-mail conversation), bluffmejl (hoax e-mail).
I'm of the younger generation, and I quite like the way this works in swedish. "Mejl" to me seems like a thing in itself, rather than the two words electronic mail abbreviated.
bqmjjx0kac
I have slipped into calling email "mail" and real mail "snail mail".
adamomada
If I were to make a bet I’d say it’s because e happens to be a vowel. It makes email look like a proper word. If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>If it was instead fmail (for whatever reason) I think you’d still see a hyphen
I thing “gmail” is the counter example.
VoodooJuJu
Some compounds just seem to naturally shift from hyphen-separated to no separation. Just one facet of the evolution of language, its spelling, and the randomness at play. E-mail isn't necessarily any more deserving of a hyphen than words like permafrost or sitcom are. Why didn't they get hyphens? Who knows.
flowerbreeze
I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it would be a strange thing to send somebody.
InCityDreams
So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'? Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
rdlw
Welcome to speaking about technology in a language other than English!
I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked.
In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change.
Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words.
E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
zestyping
Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
chiefalchemist
> The hyphen makes it read better,
Along the same lines, I wish the standard for using the / required a space before and after.
second/syllable
second / syllable
I find the latter much easier on the eye, especially when copy is dense. It's easier to read the individual words and identify the / at the same time. Without the spaces adds processing overhead imho.
assbuttbuttass
The New Yorker also makes some other... unconventional typographic decisions such as using a diaeresis in words like coöperate or reëxamined
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
oh_sigh
Right. Good for them for having a unique style, but I don't know why anyone else would decide to format their text like this. Same thing with the recent "black"/"Black" decision by NYTimes.
js2
The NYT, er, N.Y.T. has a crazy set of rules for acronyms/initialisms.
Acronyms—which according to the N.Y.T is any initialism which is pronounceable as a word instead of by its individual letters—are styled in all capitals when they are four letters or fewer. Longer acronyms are styled in titlecase.
Meanwhile, initialisms retain periods between the capital letters. (I find this to be terribly ugly since it messes up kerning.)
So with this combination of rules we get this ridiculous result: N.F.L., NATO, and Nafta.
They used to write "Nascar", but it seems they've changed their mind on that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/now-it-is-officia...
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/national-associat...
I wonder if anyone can figure out why the N.Y.T. styles broadcast networks as acronyms? ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/magazine/on-language-ling...
Stratoscope
It gets even weirder. A few years ago the New Yorker had a short article talking about SOS, the emergency signal used in Morse Code.
And they wrote it S.O.S. Which is patently wrong.
SOS is not sent in Morse like this, as if it were three separate letters:
dit dit dit (pause) dah dah dah (pause) dit dit dit
(The letter "S" is "dit dit dit" and the letter "O" is "dah dah dah".)
It's sent all at once without pauses between the letters, because it is not the three separate letters at all. SOS is a "prosign", sent like this:
dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit
To help indicate this, SOS is customarily typeset with an overbar connecting the letters, like this:
___
SOS
It's not an initialism, not three separate letters, and definitely not S.O.S.
lou1306
Just playing devil's advocate here, but cooperate and cooper have different pronunciations, and coöperate (or co-operate) makes it absolutely clear.
googlryas
I can't imagine that to be the case, because this is English...there are numerous common words that are spelled exactly the same, but pronounced differently (read, wind, wound off the top of my head). The fact that they don't give them any special treatment(diatrics or something else) makes me think the legibility is not the concern.
Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as to what the word says. I personally have never misread cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
bombcar
It’s the best kind of correct - technically correct.
Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
jonpalmisc
If this stuff (typography, punctuation, etc.) interests you, definitely check out Butterick’s Practical Typography [1]. Great resource and easy to follow.
unmole
But please don't do things like this:
> Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
> Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so.
Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
flyingfences
The site also has a page on Underlining [0], in which the author explains his perspective on underlining as an unsightly relic of mechanical typewriters, which had no other ways -- italicizing, bolding, different fonts, small-caps -- of emphasizing text. His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter.
kergonath
To me hyperlinks are about the only valid use of underline. It’s clumsy and ugly when used for emphasis or in titles, but hyperlinks cannot really be distinguished otherwise (a different colour helps as well, but you cannot guarantee that it will be rendered correctly, and it is distracting in a long text).
unmole
> His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter.
All the more reason not to have jarring capitalisation and weird circles.
bombcar
The sum and the whole of the law shall be do whatever everyone else does unless you have a damn good reason, imo.
AlanYx
Butterick’s advice en dashes is fairly controversial though, in that it's the opposite of the advice given in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style and other works, with no real explanation given for Butterick's position.
kergonath
I don’t have The Elements of Typographic Style at hand; how does their usage differ? Butterick mentions ranges and connexion between two words, which sounds about right.
jerry1979
I can practically feel that cut off capital A in my arms and chest.
phdelightful
> In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but Latex does this pretty well (“mastered” is a bit fuzzy I guess).
zamadatix
The hyphenation dictionaries browsers use for CSS hyphenation seem to be pretty accurate as well. At least for English.
kqr
It goes way beyond dictionaries though. Once you know where you can break words, how do you know where you should break words?
A simple flood fill will hyphenate very enthusiastically, use suboptimal breaking points, does not consider stretching whitespace, and leads to rivers and other artifacts.
Many more sophisticated algorithms suffer from the same problems. Last I used LaTeX seriously, it also produced rivers where a human using e.g. Scribus would not.
jfk13
All those I'm aware of are directly based on those used in the TeX world, so that's to be expected.
What browsers are less good at, though, is determining exactly which lines to hyphenate when the possibility exists. If the 'hyphens: auto' property is used, they tend to be too eager, whereas (La)TeX applies hyphenation much more judiciously.
MikeDelta
I think that is thanks to the Knuth-Plass algorithm, with Knuth being the inventor of Tex, which powers Latex. The problem seems not trivial indeed.
http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-...
http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaki...
zestyping
I wonder if they're referring to cases where the hyphenation opportunities differ for words with different meaning but identical spelling. In some cases, the meaning (and hence the accenting, and hence the hyphenation) can only be derived from context, as with "present", which can be hyphenated "pre-sent" or "pres-ent".
stewx
There is so much you can get for free these days. I see it on packages everywhere:
-Gluten free
-Sugar free
-Fat free
-Dairy free
atoav
There is this silly thing with typographic rules — I just don't care about them too much.
They are different in any language and other than languages themselves they are rather arbitrary conventions. Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
testbjjl
> Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
How you communicate is sometimes more important than what you communicate. How you communicate can detract from what you communicate. How you communicate allows the reader better grasp what you communicate.
denton-scratch
The media is the massage.
brimble
> Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
Following conventions & rules is exactly how you communicate those ideas. Failing to do so tends to cause confusion and distraction. It's not about what's right and what's wrong—it's about compassion for one's readers.
kergonath
I think that if I manage to use different words and grammar rules when writing in a different language, which are also arbitrary conventions, then I should also be able to use the right typography. It’s not that hard to avoid things like ¿ or «.
MerelyMortal
> ?!
I would like to introduce the interrobang: ‽
nescioquid
You can have a little more nuance (as in chess annotations) with two characters:
?!: questionable or unsound move, but possibly strong
!?: seems to be a strong move, but possibly unsound
BTW, I thought these were all called interrobangs. Not so?
denton-scratch
> precious few are devoted to a single mark.
"Eats Shoots and Leaves" is surely the canonical apostrophe rant.
SeanLuke
Eats Shoots and Leaves is riddled with punctuation errors. What it is is a canonical example of why the British, who long ago abandoned consistent punctuation, should not write books lecturing others about punctuation.
I think the best takedown of this hilariously bad screed is here:
denton-scratch
I don't treat it as a lecture; I treat it as a pretty funny rant.
I agree that it's snobby; but I still enjoy her poke at "Carrot's £1" - the "grocer's apostrophe". It's a book of satirical humour, you're not supposed to take it too seriously.
Oh, the inconsistency of English is by design. Was it Doctor Higgins in My Fair Lady who claimed to be able to locate the origin of any English accent? The perverse grammar of English (and I suppose any other language) is a xenophobic shibboleth[0].
ramshorns
I thought it was about a comma? But the book discusses all kinds of punctuation.
jonathankoren
Hyphenated prefixes are dumb. There’s literally no reason for it. People already know how to pronounce cooperate. However, if you’re feeling fancy, they proper punctuation is a diaeresis.
Melatonic
I usually get distracted when reading material like this but this time I found it really -
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I'm a little surprised that anyone would write this article without mentioning the en-dash and em-dash. They are frequently confused with hyphens but serve a rich and sometimes overlapping variety of purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash
(Edited to fix the spelling of em-dash. Doh!)