thoughts, ideas, projects and musings
October 1, 2008 at 11:39 am
· Filed under life
All too rarely do you see anyone coming out in favour of particular punctuation marks. With the obvious exception of the punctilious Lynne Truss, I’ve not seen a panegyrical prose to punctuation for a long while so in a bid to correct this injustice, I offer you my homage to the hyphen.
First up, let’s just look at this sign. What do they mean? Are they advertising that here, in this Canadian suburb, it’s possible to purchase rugs of enormous dimensions. Is it that the discounts available are huge, that the space available is large or that the range is fit for a persian King?
Had the sign had space, a hyphen would have made it all so much easier to understand. “Huge Rug-Sale” it would exclaim or even “Huge-Rug Sale” and we’d all know whether to expect floor coverings of the most preposterous proportions or simply a wide range of offerings at a discounted price.
Things are clearer, less ambiguous with a hyphen. Feel free to use one today, it’ll cost yer nothing.
Next week, “I love semi-colons” (reader, notice the hyphen?)
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calum wrote @ October 1st, 2008 at 4:06 pm
The hyphen is urgent and key, yes, particularly when dealing with less than canonically phrased phrases; it can aid interpretation and, by increasing the speed with which the text can be comprehended, allows the reader to plough on, unbefuddled. However, for reasons other than mere contrariness, I would argue that ambiguity is, outside of specific (and often legal) contexts, something that should be revelled in. Setting aside the possibility that the HRS sign is adverting to a huge sale of huge rugs (something worth considering in these increasingly non-binary (first hyphen!) times), the lack of punctuative clarification allows the beholder the opportunity to visualise if not a panoply then at least an array of possibilities, to allow his or her imagination to be stretched, even just a little, in a way that an unambiguously punctuated sign would not. No, the hyphenated sign is a railroad, grabbing the reader’s mind and demanding it follow one path. Unhyphenated, the reader is a little freeer than he or she would otherwise have been. Freedom, as we were told, somewhat impliedly, by QFX in 1994, is a thing most nifty.
Also, aloud, HUGE RUG SALE is funner to say, equal emphasis on each word, than HUGE-RUG SALE or HUGE RUG-SALE, which is singsongier and therefore leaves the speaker sounding like a primary school teacher attempting to mask fury or some sort of unbearably keen children’s television presenter (depending on accent), neither of which is What You Want.
None of which is to denigrate your blogpost, and is, in truth, just a way for me to pass time that would otherwise be given over to unbillable seagull watching (see? DO YOU SEE?).
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