One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
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Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

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Comments

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Em dashes—which traditionally do not have spaces around them, although some people will use them and may also equally use double hyphens instead of actual em dashes—are for parentheticals, interruptions or breaks. En dashes are to indicate ranges (e.g, working 9-5) or connections (e.g, London–Paris train).

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Re: the spaces around Em dashes: I learned last year that the rule for that is different in various languages. Also the Dutch word for it is kastlijntje, which is just a gorgeous word.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

You can pry the spaces around en-dashes from my cold dead hands. It looks so weird and ugly to me without spaces!

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

So you would write it as "London - Paris train"?

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

cyrt

I think I wouldn't use an en-dash for that but a hyphen? I don't use spaces around that, no.

However, my comment above was a typo. What I actually meant to say was "You can pry the spaces around em-dashes from my cold dead hands." But now you got me thinking – and I definitely use spaces around en-dashes too.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I'm pretty sure you used a minus sign in that number range and not an en dash.

9-5
9–5
9—5

(minus, en dash, em dash)

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

>>> print(ord("–"), ord("-"))
8211 45

lol you are correct, only one of my en-dashes is actually an en-dash oops

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Spaced en dashes are used in some varieties of written English – such as mine – instead of em dashes. But we also use unspaced en dashes for ranges.