It’s time we answered this.
Per Grammarly, (Which stands with its friends, colleagues, and family in Ukraine, as well as all the people of Ukraine, and you know what? We do too.) a hyphen “join(s) words or parts of words” while a dash is…a little more complicated.
Basically, if you’re describing a lot of wide-eyed children, you’re using hyphens. If you’re talking a lot about Marquez Valdes-Scantling? Hyphens. But if you start calling something Texas–style chili? That’s a dash. And if you’re doing a parenthetical phrase? That’s also a dash, but it’s a different kind. Say you’re saying something like, “I don’t like forest fires—because of how scary they are—but damn, do I respect them.” You just used a dash. But different than the dash you used for Texas–style chili.
We’ll have to get into the different types of dashes some other time, I think. For today, we’re focusing on the hyphen.
First, we need to specify how to use it. Why is “wide-eyed” allowed to use a hyphen but “Texas–style” is not? Great question. Personally, I’m going to guess this difference gets obliterated in a few years. It’s already on its way, partially because of have-been-using-hyphens-when–we–should’ve–been–using–en–dashes blogs like ours. But for now, hyphens are allowed by style guides if it’s a compound word (self-restraint), a number that’s been spelled out (thirty-two), or there’s a “compound modifier” before a noun. What’s a modifier? An adjective or adverb. Something that modifies another word. What makes it compound? When two modifiers must be joined together to achieve their intended meaning. The children aren’t both wide and eyed. They’re wide-eyed.
Second, how the hell did we get here? What makes hyphens so special? Who decided that hyphens would be separate from all the other dashes? Are hyphens a kind of dash?
For this, we turn to the Wikipedia article for the storied hyphen, which has an “Origin and History” section explaining that hyphenation started with the ancient Greeks. Back then, the hyphen was written beneath the words that were supposed to be joined, which sounds like an underscore, and maybe is? Maybe hyphens used to be written “wide_eyed.” I’m not positive, but they’re using the word “sublinear” a lot in this article. When Johannes Gutenberg got up to all that shit in Mainz (editor’s note: I believe Stu is referring to the invention of the printing press), he couldn’t do the sublinear hyphen so he moved it up to the middle of the line. Is this where it converged with the dash, like how sharks and whales look similar but took widely different evolutionary paths? You might think that, if you’re a big dumb idiot like me. Actually, dashes…didn’t even exist yet at that point?
Turning to the Wikipedia article for the humble dash, which has a “History” section (but no origin section, which is hurting us right now), I’m getting the idea Shakespeare, or Nicholas Okes—one of Shakespeare’s printers, invented them? You tell me if you’re getting the same idea from this passage:
“In the early 1600s, in Okes-printed plays of William Shakespeare, dashes are attested that indicate a thinking pause, interruption, mid-speech realization, or change of subject. The dashes are variously longer ⸺ (as in King Lear reprinted 1619) or composed of hyphens — (as in Othello printed 1622); moreover, the dashes are often, but not always, prefixed by a comma, colon, or semicolon.”
That’s how the “History” section starts. Is there another way for me to take that? I think I’ve just been told Shakespeare invented the dash. Or Nick Okes. Is Nick Okes the Nate Oats of punctuation?
So, that’s what we know about the hyphen, complete with a guess about how it got separated from its imitators, the dash family. We’ll be following up on this, I’m sure.
