Thanks tonybob but there is a real shortage of "inverted commas" on this forum, and indeed the inverted commas from my laptop looks distictly un-comma like, and what are 'these'? Speech marks? Help, get me a pedant, quickly! (Note good use of an adverb there).

We have often had occasion to remind Members of the swift decline of standards which began a hundred years ago and continues apace to-day. So much has already been lost or forgotten! A case in point is provided by the long or doubled dash.

Dashes have many types and more uses, too many to enumerate here in full; we wish to draw attention to only two of them.

A) The em-rule or dash ordinaire is used within a sentence:

1) to break, within a sentence, its grammatical continuity
2) to stand on either side of parentheses, repetitions, or emphasis
3) to introduce an afterthought, a summary, a balancing phrase, or an amplification.

B) The double em-rule or dash doublé is used at the end of a sentence which is broken off; it indicates incompleteness.

The absolute distinction between these two types of dashes will we trust be evident.

C) Then there are three points (within a sentence) indicating hesitation; and where hesitation results in incompleteness (at the end of a sentence, that is) we expect to find neither a double dash nor even the three points but in fact four of them.

On this page from R.H. Benson's spiritual novel Initiation, first published in 1914, we see clearly distinguished the cases set out above: the em-rule, the double em-rule, the three points of hesitation, and the four points!


How subtle the distinction, impossible to-day, between the double dash after "Catholic," showing only the incompleteness of the utterance, and the four points after "missed the point, somehow," which emphasize the speaker's hesitation!

Incidentally the phrase "half-formed and inchoate" will we expect be quite useful in our forthcoming contribution to the Stockhausen thread.

It is is it not the Penguin people who are at least partly to blame for the deplorable loss of all these distinctions, and for the slip-shod standards with which we are to-day expected somehow to content ourselves.

Mr. Harp's heart is evidently in the right place, but his dots not. Where there are three dots, they should be preceded by a space; but where there are four they should not.

Thank you. I hope you're going to publish it soon.

Should I have put a space before the smiley, I wonder?

It is quite clear to us (as discussed extensively on the 'Favourite titles' thread, a discussion indeed which was responsible for the establishment of the present thread) that where there are four dots the first of them represents the normal full stop to end a sentence and the second third and fourth the run of three dots normally taken to signify an omission hesitation or lacuna. Thus in the example given from a certain 'spiritual novel' previously unknown to us (we do not feel we have missed much), the reason for the four dots after 'missed the point, somehow' is that 'missed the point, somehow' concludes a sentence complete in itself. The notional omission signified by the three further dots is an omission of one or more complete (albeit imagined) sentences, as distinct from the omission of words or phrases from an otherwise visible/audible sentence.

We note with interest Member Bryn's mention of the space between the three dots (curious is it not how punctuation sometimes appears to reflect the heavenly vista!). We are quite ready to be corrected but we do not believe there to be or to have been any system of punctuation in which the distinction between three spaced dots '. . .' and three closer dots '...' (nowadays often called 'an ellipsis') is significant. It is rather is it not a matter of convention: a century ago, even a half-century ago (before the pernicious influence of the so aptly-dubbed 'Penguin people' had become so overwhelming), it was usual to space one's dots. Nowadays it is considered more correct not to space them.

The most recent development, which we can only regard with dismay, is the tendency not even to have a space between the first of the three dots and the word preceding it!

I'm afraid so.

Alistair, any chance of keeping even references to the discussion in the new part of the board reserved for those who wind up and those who get wound? Thanks. And by the way, while we are still in the Pedantry Thread, 'a bit' is, always has been, and perhaps even always will be two words!

I've never seen anyone do it on here, although at least one member regularly talks about himself in the first person plural ...

What is now troubling me, tinners, (re. the suggestion in Msg 137) is that emoticae such as ' ' and  '', each of which could be said to share (in some respects but not all) the function of the '!', are said to require a full stop before their appearance, whilst the '!', by contrast, replaces  -   one might say embraces and incorporates   -  the full stop.

A related anxiety is that if the emoticon is placed after the full stop is there not a danger that it will most naturally be construed as colouring the tone of the sentence following rather than the sentence preceding? An example which could lead to confusion would be:

"I found the cat in the spin-drier this morning. He's fine though."