Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Genius of Ignorance

I was explaining the various dashes (hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes, etc) and Elisa suggested they - those mysterious thems - should rename 'hyphen' to 'r-dash'. It all makes sense on paper: m = em-dash; n = en-dash; so r = r-dash

3 comments:

Rodney Love said...

What the hell are m-dashes and n-dashes?

zebra factory said...

If you have to ask, you can't afford them! A dash '-' comes in differing lengths which indicates various things in typography/text when used. Wiki has a good - but verbose - page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

People are quite passionate about how you should or shouldn't use them in certain circles... 1000 ships and all that.

Rodney Love said...

Who knew there were so many dash-like characters!?