Shorter is not shorter, and longer is not longer.
One day while listening to the radio, I was oddly jolted when the drive-time talk-show host announced the website address of that day’s guest. “That’s Unfortunate English dot com . . . specifically, Unfortunate hyphen English dot com.”
I looked at the radio, and nearly whispered, “He got it right.” The little vertically suspended punctuation mark (-) between connected words is indeed a hyphen. And this sentence ends with a hyphenated-word. This is opposed to a dash, the wider-shouldered vertically suspended punctuation mark (—) that connects not words, but phrases and clauses. English speakers seem to be losing their grasp of the distinction.
57 Then there's the computer printer that I broke by adding in too many parts (well, I never did such a thing, but let’s not mix analogies). Consider the ugly new verb we’re seeing on computer screens: login, as in ‘‘Click here and login.” The preposition has been added to log, creating the now defective verb login. I login, you login, he . . . he . . . damn! He broke that one, too. (For more on this particular rant, see “Hell oh Hell,” on page 211.)
Fittingly, the example that jolted me is also an example of why people forget about or perhaps even ignore the once-venerable hyphen. The talk-show host was delineating an address for the Internet, where the revered period has been descriptively relabeled a “dot.” That, frankly, doesn’t bother me, as dot not only is easier to say in a time when we’re swapping web and email addresses nearly hourly, but also clearly communicates the function of our cute little punctuational speck. After all, we don’t refer to the dot in dollar figures as a period. It is clearly tagged a decimal point.
But in those cases, a dot is a dot is a dot. A hyphen is not a dash, nor a dash a hyphen. But the same verbal shorthand that reduced period to dot generally has people inflating the shorter-thing- longer-word hyphen into the longer-thing-shorter-word dash. Had Mr. Talk Show said “Unfortunate dash English dot com,” I likely would have simply shrugged mentally and thought, as I’ve done occasionally, “Heaven forfend you ever encounter an underscore, and thank God we’ve stopped using tildes in web addresses.” Once again, with people engaged so heavily in web-speak (and not web—speak) and email address exchanges, I’m fully expecting the everyday English speaker’s distinction between dash and hyphen to fade, while I take solace that people haven’t taken to referring to the major punctuation symbols as comma, colon, and dot. Not yet, at least.
As an aside, the word hyphen comes from Greek, ultimately from a word meaning “together.” The Greek hyphen itself was a kind of U symbol placed underneath the connected words, which I consider to be punctuational poetry. But it would make for some pretty confusing website addresses . . .
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Bill Brohaugh