Author: The Grey Literature

This is the personal blog of Benjamin Gregory Carlisle PhD. Queer; Academic; Queer academic. "I'm the research fairy, here to make your academic problems disappear!"

Em dashes, en dashes, hyphens and The Last Battle

The Last Battle p. 205
The Last Battle p. 205

A few weeks ago I found a typo in The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis.

This was shocking, to say the least. So, of course, I went looking for some more. I found one in The Last Battle.

Before I point out the typo that I found, I should clarify the distinction between a few different kinds of typographical marks. Specifically, I will be speaking about hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.

Hyphens

Hyphens are used to join two words together or separate syllables of a single word. Hyphens are what you use for compound modifiers, like “well-respected,” or for other compound words, like “being-in-the-world,” if you were talking about phenomenology. An hyphen is the mark that you get on a Mac when you press the button that has a horizontal line on it. It’s beside the button that has the “equals” and “addition” signs on it (if you use a QWERTY keyboard).

En dashes

En dashes are probably less familiar to you than hyphens. An en dash is what you see in a range of numbers or to contrast values. For example, if you wanted to write “see pages one to twenty-one,” but using numerals instead of words, you could write “see pages 1–21.” You’ll note that the en dash is slightly longer than the hyphen. You get the en dash on a Mac when you hold down the option key and press the same key as the hyphen.

Em dashes

An em dash is used to indicate a break in thought or an explanation or to introduce an interpolating thought with a break that is even stronger than parentheses. It is also used to indicate that a speaker was interrupted.

For example, “I ate the cookies—all of them—and felt no remorse.” [Interpolating thought]

Or, “I just can’t believe—” [The speaker was interrupted]

Or, “This is the way to get there—the way to get there without being noticed, of course.” [Explanation]

The em dash is even longer than the en dash. You can type an em dash on a Mac when you press and hold the shift and option keys while pressing the same key as the hyphen or en dash.

What does this have to do with The Last Battle?

Look at the typographical mark between “Marsh” and “wiggle” in the scanned page from The Last Battle. It’s an em dash. It’s way too long to be an hyphen. In fact, there’s an hyphen at the end of the line, in the middle of “disenchanted” for comparison.

Hyphens are used for compound words, like Marsh-wiggle. Em dashes are used for something completely different.

If you own another edition of The Last Battle, can you find this typo in your copy? I’m reading from the 1995 Scholastic reprint.

GC [sic] Habs Go

GC Habs Go
GC Habs Go

I understand the desire to include the logo of one’s sports team of choice in the place of letters that are part of an encouragement to that team.

This only works, however, if the logo is not in fact a different letter of the alphabet than the letter it replaces.

For example, if a team’s logo was, say a stylised hockey puck, that could be used to replace the “O” in “Go [Team Name] Go!”

There’s just something unsettling about seeing the letter “O” replaced by a logo that is essentially a stylised letter “C” with a letter “H” inside it.

Stickers on the glass of a pizza place

Pizza sticker
Pizza sticker

By my house, there’s a Double Pizza, and for the last little while, there’s been a big poster in their front window advertising for cheap pizza. A couple days ago, I guess they decided that the promotion was over, and put stickers on the glass in front of the poster.

This makes me smile. I think it’s because the original numbers are clearly visible behind the stickers. It’s like they’re saying, “Yeah, prices went up. Oh well.”

Two more things that annoy me about Microsoft Word for Mac 2011

Okay, I promise that after this, I will stop posting about the shortcomings of Word. Just two more things, I swear. And they’re little things too.

Horizontal scroll bug
Horizontal scroll bug

First, every time that I open a document (a new one, or a saved one), the horizontal scroll bar seems to indicate that I could scroll just a little bit to the right, or that I’m not quite zoomed out far enough to see the entire document.

This is, of course, not true. The instant that I resize the window, Word realises that the width of the document in view is the  full width of the document, and removes the horizontal scroll bar, but it really bothers me that it’s always there. I shouldn’t have to resize my document window every time I open it up, just to get rid of the horizontal scroll bar. It’s sloppy.

 

Save as
Save as

Second, if I push command-N, which makes a brand-new Word document, then save it, without changing any of the formatting or even entering any text or doing anything to it at all, I get a “Save as” sheet like the one shown in the attached image.

What I don’t like about this is that the default settings give me a yellow exclamation mark in a triangle and red warning text that says, “Compatibility check recommended.”

To get rid of the red text and yellow triangle, I need to click on “Compatibility Report …” then run a compatibility report, and of course, it turns up that there’s nothing to worry about, and it goes away.

Why should Word give me a warning when I don’t do a single thing that could possibly offend it? I’m trying to save a blank Word document. I should only get red letters and yellow exclamation marks in the case that I’m doing something strange. Maybe if I had inserted a linked document or a table or something like that, then I could expect it to warn me that saving it would have some compatibility issues.

Then again, maybe this is a commentary on the compatibility of Word with other versions of Word.

It’s the little things that really make me wonder about this software.

Mosquito ringtone

Dead LG Shine
Dead LG Shine

Last week, my phone died. This was unexpected because my phone was less than a year old. That said, the phone would heat up incredibly for no reason during its last days. Maybe it was time. I think the phone might have gone and committed suicide in protest because it saw me looking at plans for iPhones, and it got jealous.

Attached is a photograph of the only thing that my old phone does now. The battery is the same battery as I’ve always used, but now the phone will only tell me to use a “genuine battery,” and then it starts counting down from 10. It gets stuck around 3, and if you wait a really long time it eventually shuts off.

I lost all the phone numbers that were in it, but I think I had most of them in my address book on my computer anyway.

On the upside, I was thinking about getting an iPhone anyway, to help with developing an iPhone app that I’ve had in mind for a while. Also, this means that I can have a custom ringtone, and of course, I converted an mp3 I’ve had sitting on my computer for years to make the “Mosquito” ringtone. It’s ten seconds of shrill goodness that many adults can’t hear.

I tried this out on my friends a few years back, and most of them (in their late teens/early twenties) could hear it fine (or pretended they could). I had one friend in her mid-/late-twenties who couldn’t hear it, and thought that we were all playing a joke on her. It was awesome. :)

You can download my new ringtone here, formatted for the iPhone. Just drag it into your iTunes.

A bug in Endnote X4 and Microsoft Word for Mac 2011

In Word, you can have multiple windows open for the same document. Go to the menu along the top, click Window > New Window. In this way, you can have two pages of the same document open at the same time. It’s great for editing. Good feature. (Thanks, Microsoft!)

What’s bad is that if you try to insert a citation while having two windows of the same document open, the citation will be added to the first window of the document that was opened, regardless of which window has focus. This can be confusing.

Also, if you try to add a citation in Word using Endnote while in full-screen mode, it won’t let you, because it thinks you’re in Publisher Mode.

Montréal Métro iPhone app

Logo for Montréal Métro Exits
Logo for Montréal Métro Exits

On and off for the last little bit, I’ve been working on a little bit of a side-project: Something for when I don’t want to think about research ethics anymore. I was inspired to do this by something I heard on CBC a while back. A guy in London, UK made an iPhone app that would tell you which car to exit so that you would be closest to the exit on the subway.

I thought that this was a great idea. I would certainly use an application like that! Turns out someone already did it for Montréal, but they did a crappy job of it. The data set is incomplete, and the interface leaves much to be desired. Also, this other app tells you nothing about which car to board in order to transfer. In fact, the other app told you only which métro car to exit in order to be near the exit, not which métro car to enter, which seemed to undermine the point of the app. You need to know which car to board before you get on the train. (You can’t just infer one from the other, though, since in some cases the train approaches from the right side of the platform and in some cases it approaches from the left.)

I decided to write an app that would be really simple from the user’s perspective—just choose two stations, and the app tells you which car to get into at your departure station, and then which car to get into at your transfer station(s) (if applicable). I thought it would be a good exercise, just as practice for some other ideas for iPhone apps that I’ve had.

So, a couple weeks ago, I donned my lab coat, grabbed a clip board and went to every métro station in Montréal and wrote down where all the exits were. I also collected information regarding transfers. Writing the app wasn’t so hard, although submitting it to the iTunes store was a bit of a headache. That said, it was approved on my first try, and it took less than a week. (Thanks, Apple!)

It was getting Apple to process my tax forms that was the longest part of the development process.

The app was approved on Friday the 18th, and Apple processed my Canadian tax info last Tuesday. I had to fill out some US tax forms (just indicating that I wasn’t a US citizen) and then today they finally started selling my app on the iTunes store.

Tell your friends! Seriously. Every month I get roughly 300 visits to my blog from people in the Montréal area. If I could get a few of you guys to post this to your Facebook, I’d be raking it in. :)

Now that I’ve sort of figured out how to write and submit an app for the iPhone, I’ve got my sights set on bigger cities where this sort of app hasn’t been written before. (Yes, there are still some. Not many!) Also, I have a few ideas for other, better iPhone apps that I think could be a lot of fun. I’m not about to start posting my ideas on the internet though: That’s a great way to have someone else make my app before I do. :P