Do you Know Your Dashes?

Rob Bell:
Hello and welcome to Sketchplanations The Podcast.

We discuss the big ideas and compelling facts explained within the enormous collection of sketches at sketchplanations.com to help provide fodder for your own interesting conversations.

I'm engineer and broadcaster Rob Bell, and with me in the studio are my friends of almost 30 years, creator of Sketchplanations, Jono Hey, and entrepreneur and past winner of The Apprentice, Tom Pellereau.

Hello once again, dear fellows.

Tom Pellereau:
Hello, 30 years old, yes, indeed.

Rob Bell:
30 years old?

Tom Pellereau:
Of 30 years.

Jono Hey:
Met at the hospital.

Rob Bell:
This time, we're talking about knowing your dashes, which without any context, I do appreciate is possibly quite a curious little collection of words.

So let's turn straight away to the guy who sketches what he knows, or at least what he's recently learned through rigorous and punctilious research.

Jono, what's all this about knowing your dashes?

We're talking punctuation, aren't we?

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

This is quite an old sketch for something I learned actually when I was doing all the typography and things on webpages primarily.

Rob Bell:
Ah, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jono Hey:
Of all my sketches, this is the most tably.

It's really a table.

I'm introducing these subtleties in different concepts, which not everybody has come across, although some of them have more recently come to light more widely.

Rob Bell:
It's a 4 by 3 table.

Jono Hey:
Yes, that would be it.

But the different types of dashes, which is very subtle to the uninitiated, is a hyphen, an N dash.

Rob Bell:
Spelt E N.

Jono Hey:
Spelt E N and an M dash.

Rob Bell:
Spelt E M.

Jono Hey:
Spelt E M.

And I quite like it because the second column in my table is three different lines, which are...

I mean, you can see that they're different, but you have to look closely that they're different.

Rob Bell:
I already love the subtlety of this sketch, Jono.

Sorry, carry on.

I am absolutely swimming in it.

I love it.

Jono Hey:
You could be forgiven for thinking that all dashes that you see in text are the same, but it turns out they are not all the same.

Rob Bell:
And when you're responsible for writing that on a website, that is going to be seen by thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

Jono Hey:
That would be nice.

Rob Bell:
You want to get it right.

Jono Hey:
Then maybe you should get it right.

But more to the point, if you if you edit journals or newspapers or type set books, then you should know this stuff.

And so, you know, I'm coming in from the uninitiated to the slightly initiated, but there are some people for whom, you know, they take this very seriously, no doubt.

Rob Bell:
Can you then explain the difference between when you should use the hyphen, the short dash, the n dash, the kind of medium length, and the m dash, the longest of the three lengths?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, yeah.

And I could actually talk at length about each of these.

So hopefully we get the option to do that.

Rob Bell:
Jono, this is freeform.

This is a podcast.

We go as long as we want, as long as we need.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, so I don't know about you, but the first one that people are familiar with generally is the hyphen, right?

Like you grew up with a hyphen and you see it in books and a hyphen does a couple of things.

One is if you've got a paragraph and your line wraps and you're in the middle of a long word, you can use a hyphen to indicate that you're still continuing that word and you're going to come around on the other side and carry on with your word.

Rob Bell:
Can I make a point on that?

Because when I was a kid and I used to write thank you letters, yeah, right.

And you've not really...

Jono Hey:
You don't do that now.

Rob Bell:
Probably thank you emails more now.

But when you're a kid and you're writing your thank you letters and you're not used to writing a letter, and so you'd start a word and you're writing it all over the shop anyway, and it would go towards the edge of the page.

So not even at the end of a syllable, just at some point when you ran out of space on the page for that word, you'd do a hyphen and then finish it on the next word, which probably isn't the correct use.

Do you not supposed to do it between syllables in a word?

Jono Hey:
That's a good question.

I don't know.

I just do it when you run out of space.

We're so used to working with computers these days, it all just happens automatically.

It does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In fact, once you had fully justified text, you tend not to run into it at all very often because it will adjust the spacing of the words for you so that you never have hyphens.

You don't actually see it that much anymore.

Rob Bell:
That's just one use of a hyphen, isn't it?

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Rob Bell:
Are there other uses or at least one other?

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
The classic use of a hyphen is tying together two words that are intimately related.

Rob Bell:
Classic.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

So you might have self-study.

It's one thing and I'm putting these together as one single concept.

Rob Bell:
Can we think of some other...

I mean, you've done some good examples in the sketch there.

Tie-in, toll-free.

They do come together.

They're almost one word, right?

Jono Hey:
Would you like some more?

Yeah, go on.

I do have some more.

Rob Bell:
Because I really enjoy using this because I think I understand it quite well.

So when I am writing, I do revel in the fact that I could use this.

I'll say in inverted commas correctly.

Jono Hey:
All right, I'll throw some out.

Rob Bell:
You're right, Tommy.

Jono Hey:
Time bomb, laughing stock, ice cream, crowdfunding, cross-sell, aircraft carrier, call up, climb down, grown up, new found, short-lived, war chest, witch hunt.

Anyway, we could go on.

Rob Bell:
Well, I'll probably fade that out in the end.

That's perfect.

Jono Hey:
Finish the episode with me reading this gently into the background.

Rob Bell:
It's lovely.

It's not horrific, I'd say.

Jono Hey:
I thought actually, because while we're on hyphens, I think it's quite interesting.

There's a little progression, I think, in concepts of how they get used.

So for example, wildlife, used to be wild space life, and then it was wild hyphen life, and now it becomes wildlife.

Rob Bell:
One word.

Jono Hey:
As one word, as these things become more and more well-accepted.

I thought, good example, this podcast is produced by Bellboy Productions.

Bellboy used to be separate and then it was hyphenated.

Now it's acceptable as one word.

Rob Bell:
Right.

Jono Hey:
Bellboy.

Actually, I think a really relevant one is well-being.

So well-being used to be two words, and then it became a thing of its own right and was hyphenated together.

I think if you search for usages of well-being versus well-being as a single word, well-being by itself is growing as the concept gets more established.

So it doesn't need the hyphen anymore.

Rob Bell:
There is this natural progression in language, is what you're saying.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I think so.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, I'd agree with you based on those examples there.

Jono Hey:
You can also have triple hyphens.

You probably can have quadruples, I don't know.

I was thinking of some triple hyphens like no man's land.

Rob Bell:
Good.

Jono Hey:
Or second in command.

Rob Bell:
Oh, that's lovely.

Jono Hey:
Second in command is one thing by itself.

And so, you hyphenate them all, you have two hyphens, so you have a triple word together.

And then, I read this great example on the website of where the hyphen is critical for understanding.

So, if I say five dollar bills.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Yes, bang, great.

Jono Hey:
You don't know if it's a five dollar bill or it's five dollar bills.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
And actually, you might be able to tell that if I say it, I'll say five dollar bills or something.

Or I'll say five dollar bills.

But if I just write it.

Rob Bell:
I don't know what you're talking about.

I've just been shortchanged, mate.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

Anyway, so that's hyphens.

Rob Bell:
Tommy, are you still with us?

How are you?

Tom Pellereau:
So it might come as no surprise to you that I had no idea that there were three different types of dashes or hyphens.

Rob Bell:
But nor did I, Tommy, before the sketch.

Jono Hey:
Good.

Tom Pellereau:
Excellent.

I'm glad to hear I'm not that uneducated in these ways.

And I am really not a fan.

And I kind of deliberately never used them almost in any of the three different contexts.

And I know I use AI quite a lot to help me draft things and write things.

And I have to always put in my prompt to AI, I don't use hyphens because AI loves using hyphens and these three different types the whole time.

And everyone knows that I would never use those.

So, it really makes it obvious, be a massive giveaway, that it wasn't me who wrote that email if it's got hyphens and stuff like that because that's not the sort of level of punctuation I'm able to articulate.

Rob Bell:
That's good, Tommy.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, I like that draft.

Please rewrite it without the hyphens.

I even have it as one of my command prompts.

It's always in there.

If he puts them in, I'm like, excuse me, I've told you once before, remove those, probably still one of the best ever products, the makeup brush cleaner.

Makeup, which is both and has gone through probably this progression.

I remember we had massive debates about whether it should be, could what on packaging when we're printing at one stage, a run of 200,000 pieces of packaging.

Should it be make-up?

Should it be makeup?

Because it was the makeup brush cleaner.

It's like, we don't want to get this wrong.

We know that people will take this down.

I think in here, we're like, we'll just need to put them together because that seems to be more commonly how it's written.

Jono Hey:
Just doing what other people do because otherwise they won't find you.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, otherwise they won't find us.

So we kind of went for what we thought was probably the simpler, but also had no idea that things progress through.

Rob Bell:
I've just learned that as well tonight.

We kind of observed that via Jono's observations as well.

Jono Hey:
So in the last place I worked, we had a lot of part-time, and there was forever in every page and bit of the app.

We had part-times in all different places, and my mission was to comb through and be consistent.

One of my favorite books about English is the book called Strunk and White, The Elements of Style.

And I remember somebody in my design lab said, you have to have Strunk and White, which I thought was very strange because he was a designer and software engineer.

And so I went and got it.

And it's really cool.

It has all sorts of things about this, and very opinionated about writing English.

But he talks about hyphens.

And so he had the wildlife and the bellboy examples.

But he also said, he had this passage, the hyphen can play tricks on the unwary, as it did in Chattanooga when two newspapers merged, the news and the free press.

Someone introduced the hyphen into the merger, and the paper became the Chattanooga News Free Press.

Tom Pellereau:
With no news in it.

Jono Hey:
Yes.

Dodgy use of the hyphen, by not being careful about it.

Rob Bell:
We've done the hyphen, everyone knows when it's supposed to be used.

Let's move on to the next one, the median length dash.

This one's called the N.

Jono Hey:
It's called the N dash, E, N, yeah.

Rob Bell:
Right.

Jono Hey:
I quite like this one, and actually it comes up quite a lot.

I put just here in the table that it's concepts related by distance, but it has quite a lot of use cases where basically you're connecting a range of things.

So if you write pages 10 to 12 or page 147 to 148, you should actually be using an N dash instead of a hyphen.

You're not connecting them as one thing.

You're saying it's between this one and this one.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Same with May to September, or you might have ages 8 to 11.

If you had the restaurant meals at 20 pound to 30 pounds, you would use an N dash.

If you said the workshop is from 9 to 12 in the morning, you would use an N dash.

Rob Bell:
Okay.

Jono Hey:
If you said we're open Monday to Friday, you would use an N dash, not a hyphen.

So if you could say from X to Y, you would use an N dash.

Tom Pellereau:
How do we write an N dash in any program?

Jono Hey:
If you're on a Mac, it's option hyphen.

Try that now, which you can give a go.

And Windows, this is, I don't know, it's a bit of a harder one.

It's alt 0150.

Tom Pellereau:
How do you do alt 0150?

Do I hold alt and then type 0150?

Jono Hey:
I don't know.

Can you test it for me?

And we'll cut this so that we have the right answer.

Tom Pellereau:
Yeah, I didn't do anything.

Rob Bell:
0150.

Yeah, what the heck does that mean?

Jono Hey:
So it's easy on the Mac.

Option hyphen.

Rob Bell:
I've just done it.

It was delightful.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it was nice.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

I had to go through Ctrl, alt and command to find out which one is...

What did you say?

Option.

Jono Hey:
Option, I think.

Rob Bell:
Option is alt, I think, as it turns out.

Yeah, it is.

Good.

Well, that's clear.

Jono Hey:
Good.

Rob Bell:
Listeners, I hope you're following along.

Jono Hey:
It turns out there's a bunch of other places where technically you should be using an end dash.

Because you've got connections.

Rob Bell:
This is good stuff.

Jono Hey:
So I gave the examples which I first learned it with, which is like May to September or page numbers.

But also, if you were doing a London to Paris flight, for example, or the North-South divide or a East-West trade route, you're going between these two things.

Rob Bell:
I'd be really tempted to stick a hyphen in those last two, North-South, East-West.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, you would, wouldn't you?

As would most of us.

Tom Pellereau:
Especially as no one knows how to type it.

Jono Hey:
I know how to type it, Tom.

It's not on your computer.

Also, things like, I was told where you got two sides.

So you might have a teacher-student relationship.

It's not a hyphen, like it's a teacher-student, like a thing.

Yeah.

It's a relationship between the teacher and the student.

Yeah.

Or a parent-child or a buyer-seller agreement.

Gosh.

You should use that in your contracts, Tom.

Nature-nurture debate and a cost-benefit analysis.

I was actually told that cost-benefit analysis should potentially be an end-ash, because it's between the two.

Tom Pellereau:
It should potentially be.

Jono Hey:
I'm not 100% sure about that one.

Rob Bell:
That's right.

We'll leave that one up in the air.

That's good.

Let us know.

Jono Hey:
Similarly, if you've got named partnerships, there are some examples of like, you know, Watson Crick model or Lennon McCartney songs, you're not hyphenating them or giving one of them precedence.

You're just saying like, it belongs to these, between these two.

Rob Bell:
Yes, it's between these two.

I think that's a good definition for me, like between these two.

Jono Hey:
So scores and results.

So if you'd said somebody won 3-1 or that it was 6-4 in a set.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
And also, if you have things like, if you had EU-UK negotiations, you're actually putting these are between these two.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, I'm in now.

Jono Hey:
It's not EU-UK as an entity by itself.

Rob Bell:
This is great.

That has lodged in my head, Jono.

Thank you.

Jono Hey:
Clarifying relationships.

So all sorts of places you can actually use an end dash and nobody wouldn't even know that you're doing it.

Tom Pellereau:
I love it.

Okay.

So in Word, if you type 1010 space, hyphen space 12, it will automatically then turn it into an end dash.

And that was going to be one.

My next question is, should you have spaces to be either side?

Good question.

Jono Hey:
I heard that there was variations by country for that one.

And so US, UK, English might do different things.

And I think in the UK, we often set things with space, end dash space.

Whereas in America, they tend to use the M dash, the longer one.

But I'm not typesetting books on either side of the Atlantic, so I don't know.

But I did use M dashes in my book, which was by an American printer.

Rob Bell:
Right.

Come on, let's keep it moving.

Let's do the M dash, E-M.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

So the M dash is the longest of the phrase.

And it is like adding a new thought in a sentence.

I heard a nice definition of it, which is kind of like interrupting yourself.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses.

Rob Bell:
Oh, I love it.

All brackets in the UK.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, brackets, sorry.

So it'd be like his first thought on getting out of bed, if he had any thought at all, was to get back in again.

And that middle bit.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, if he had any thought at all.

Jono Hey:
Could you hear the M dashes?

Rob Bell:
Yeah, I heard them.

I heard them.

They landed heavily.

Lovely.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, good.

Tom Pellereau:
And does the M dash go before and off?

Jono Hey:
It does, yeah.

And I also have my other style guide here.

I have the Economist style guide.

Actually, you have one on your desk, Tom.

Yeah, yeah.

It says you should only use ideally no more than one in a paragraph.

And definitely, it gets really confusing if you use more than one set in a sentence, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You don't know what's sort of parenthetical anymore.

Yes.

Or what's the side thought and what's the real thread of the sentence.

So, just one set.

But I quite like it.

I had an English teacher in secondary school and he said at the time, it's called Mr.

Broomhall, he said, brackets are for maths, commas are for English.

Rob Bell:
Did he say anything about the M dash?

Jono Hey:
He didn't tell us about the M dash, but we were in a secondary school of English.

But I think commas, if you're trying to introduce sort of side thoughts like that, your sentence can get quite complicated because you're following this little thread and then you go to the side thread and then you come back to the main one.

But you're also using the commas for pauses and breaks and your breaths as you're reading.

And so I think an M dash is a really nice way to say this is a slightly different added or adjusted thought, which is relevant, but is not part of the main thread of the sentence.

So I use them if you've read my newsletter a fair bit.

Rob Bell:
I've started using them and I don't know why, but I have started using them a lot in the last couple of years, I reckon, in casual messaging, like emails or like WhatsApp messages.

Although I'm not using the M dash, I'm using the hyphen, but I'm using that hyphen in place of an M dash to go into that secondary thought.

I really enjoy using them.

But what I often do by the end of that secondary thought, so I start it with the hyphen, which I should be an M dash.

But then by the end of it, I've forgotten and I normally finish it with a comma and carry on, and carry on, I guess it's not clear.

And then if I do remember, I go back and go, hang on, hang on, let's be clear.

This is the secondary thought in here, it needs another M dash at the end of it.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I once mentioned to somebody on my team, I was like, because sometimes in chat things like Slack or Teams or whatever.

Rob Bell:
Right, real casual, just casual stuff.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
People would write a lot of stuff in brackets.

And I was like, well, nobody speaks in brackets, that doesn't make any sense.

And it kind of bugs me when in a book, if you're reading a book and you're reading a paragraph, and then there's this big bit in brackets.

And to me, it's either important enough that you include it as the main bit, or put it at the bottom of the page where it doesn't get in the way, because I'm going to read it regardless.

So why put it in a bracket?

And I said to it, it was like, you know, nobody speaks in brackets.

So we shouldn't be messaging in brackets.

And I think it's petrified of every message that he sent me after that.

Rob Bell:
That's very good.

Jono Hey:
It's like writing these brackets and deleting them before he sent it, probably.

I didn't mean that.

You can send messages however you like.

Rob Bell:
Can I throw something in about where I've understood the names M dash and N dash come from?

It's similar to what you said, Jono, but it was from the printing industry and that refers to the width or the length, if you like, of that dash.

And an M dash was the width of a capital M in printing.

And the N dash is the width of a capital N.

M is wider than an N.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

So I have read that too.

And I don't think it's the real answer.

I think it's not far off.

And so, you know, an N is about half of an M lettered widths.

Rob Bell:
I'd say it's like two-thirds.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, it's a little bit more, but depending on the font.

And I think that was kind of the idea also is that it was more about the height of the blocks when they were typesetting with the letters and less particularly about the width of your M's and N's, but it is actually quite convenient.

I mean, it's not a bad way to remember it, if you ask me like that.

It's an M, and an M is quite a bit wider than the N.

I have read that explanation as well, but I don't think it's the real answer.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

Jono Hey:
Because actually M's, as in an EM, is a unit of space in typography.

And so you can actually set a web page in M's instead of pixels, let's say, and everything can be spaced in proportionally in M's instead.

So an M exists as its own measurement.

Rob Bell:
Gotcha.

Can I ask another question off the back of this?

We've got the hyphen, we've got the N, we've got the M.

What is the underscore all about?

Jono Hey:
Fine question.

A coding thing, right?

I don't know why you have an underscore as well, but you know, why not?

I suppose somebody came up with it.

Could have a top one as well.

Rob Bell:
I did actually look into this.

Jono Hey:
I got them.

Rob Bell:
Apparently it came about originally with mechanical typewriters and it used to be used to go back and underline words that you'd, so you'd type them out, but then you'd just kind of slide your roll back and then you'd get along to it, to the words that you wanted to underline and then you'd just use underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore to go underneath it.

And it used to be known as a low line or a low dash.

That's apparently where it came from.

And then with early computers came around, it was, you know, you didn't use to be able to save a file name with a space in it.

It got borrowed to go in place of a space.

And I think in modern usage, we've just kind of sometimes carried that on.

Jono Hey:
If you're a programmer and you've got a million variable names and you don't want to imply that they're the same concept, but you want to separate these words, then you can use an underscore.

Rob Bell:
Right.

I used to have an underscore in my first web-based email address.

Tom Pellereau:
Rob underscore Bell.

Rob Bell:
No, Captain underscore Bellend.

Tom Pellereau:
Is that page still up?

Rob Bell:
I think it still exists.

I don't use it.

So feel free to send me emails there.

They won't get read..com?

We don't need to get into that any more than we have.

Jono Hey:
Rob, can I ask, because I was curious about this as I was thinking about dashes and various types of dashes and items.

When you're writing text on a page and you're using all the elements of grammar to try and get across what it means and how you're supposed to say it, you've done loads of voiceover work and it struck me when I was thinking of, you say, I don't say an M dash, I just say the interceding thought, the thing that I just interrupted myself with.

Rob Bell:
You imply it through speech, right?

Jono Hey:
But how do you do that?

If you're doing a voiceover for something, for a TV program, let's say, you are presumably quite well trained at looking at some text and going, oh, this one, I need to say it a bit differently, or this is an adjoining thought and I'm going to raise my tone up here or inflect on this sentence.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

I think the secret to that is many takes.

Jono Hey:
That's a good direction from the producer.

Rob Bell:
Yeah.

As you read it through it, you probably get three quarters of the way through, you go, hang on, I've read that wrong.

Let's come back and have another run at that one.

Yes, I don't feel like I use or that we use different types of dashes, hyphen, N dash or M dash, to imply different means of speech.

I think you know the subject pretty well because you're doing a voiceover on it and you know where you're going.

And if you don't get it right, then you come back and do it again.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

I guess what I meant was, I was thinking about it, I came up with an example.

So if I was to say, M dashes are a vehicle, I probably use too many of them, that let you interrupt yourself mid thought.

Rob Bell:
Oh, did you?

So that I probably use too many of them.

Jono Hey:
As a written thing, I could put M dashes around that.

Rob Bell:
Lovely.

Jono Hey:
But I think when I'm reading it, I said it differently.

Like I'm reading this sentence and then I can see that this is a different thought.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, you change completely.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I change how I'm saying this thing so that that thought is connected by itself and separate from the main sentence.

Rob Bell:
So that is the performance of that piece of written prose that you've got in front of you, right?

And that M dash, yes, whether or not that M dash helped you or because you wrote it, you know that.

I'm not sure, but I have to say, Jono, that was a really well performed piece of script.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

Well, I was trying to think about all the subtle ways that we actually do do that all the time because I'm written on a page.

You need to try and let people know that this is kind of how you would say this.

Rob Bell:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
Like this belongs separately.

And that's why these things exist.

Rob Bell:
You're right.

You're right.

You're right.

I think the big question for this episode, and it is a genuine question, is how much does any of this really matter?

To me, I can be quite a pedant when it comes to grammar in certain senses, but obviously I've been getting this wrong for ages.

And I appreciate that I've been misusing the hyphen when I should have been using different dashes, both N and M dashes.

I guess it's interesting to know that there are these three distinct symbols for three distinct situations, but I'm trying to wonder now whether I will change my behaviors with it just because it's so easy just to pop in a hyphen.

Jono, I think your example, you've written a book, you've had a book published and printed thousands and thousands of times over.

So I think if I was doing that, I would want it to be grammatically perfect.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, you do.

And like, Tom, your makeup example is quite reasonable as well.

We spoke with Mark Forsythe recently.

Rob Bell:
And so Mark Forsythe is an etymologist.

Jono Hey:
Yeah.

And there's all sorts of bad language.

Makeup is a great example.

Like you can make up with somebody and it's a completely different thing than makeup.

And I know that obviously you're using it in context where it doesn't make any difference in the context about the fact that you're applying makeup is obviously that's going to tell you what it is.

But when it's really important to make sure that something is really understood, it's probably worth using the right thing to get it right.

I think a good example, which we've not talked about before, is the Oxford comma.

Oxford comma is like the comma and the last one of a list of like three things, let's say.

Rob Bell:
Which I think AI does quite a bit of as well, doesn't it?

Depending on your AI voice.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I'm not sure.

I mean, the classic example there was dedication in a book, it was like to my parents, Bill Gates and God.

Yeah.

To my parents, Anne Rand and God was the example that I'd read.

And obviously your parents are not those people.

And so if you have a comma there, it's like I'm dedicating it to three people, I'm dedicating it to my parents, I'm dedicating it to Anne Rand and I'm dedicating it to God.

And there was a law case around that where in the benefits package or whatever, that they didn't have a comma or they did have a comma and they had to do a $5 million overtime payment.

So occasionally, if you're a lawyer, this stuff probably really matters.

Rob Bell:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jono Hey:
And I think in general, I think it's a really interesting challenge.

If you look at a page of text, it's really plain.

Like a web page is interesting, right?

A web page, it doesn't really matter whether I use an M dash or an N dash on a web page, because you can see that I'm listing the hours of the shop because it's in the section called the hours of the shop.

And I can have a title called the hours and I can lay it out in a table and all this stuff.

Rob Bell:
The context is all there to use your job.

Jono Hey:
And size and layout and all these things.

But in a page of text, you've only got a few grammatical tools to try and make sure that your message is communicated correctly.

And hyphens, N dashes and M dashes are a few of these.

You've got commas, colons, semicolons, quotes, but you don't have very many.

And we can say an awful lot of things and mean an awful lot of things.

I think it's quite nice to get it right.

But obviously, I'm not going to come after you if you don't.

Rob Bell:
No, please do.

And my WhatsApps from now on.

I said, Jono, I mean, I think as long as you're understood, right, that's the main thing.

But it's really lovely.

And I really appreciate this chat.

To know that you've got those tools in your toolbox is lovely.

Tom Pellereau:
And Jono, you've been able to give us examples showing why these things matter or why they are helpful.

Matter is maybe a different thing.

Why they are useful to be able to describe things in different ways or to be able to write a sentence more in a way that you might speak.

Jono Hey:
Yeah, I think so.

I think the M dash is quite useful in text.

And where I've got a range of things, I'll use an N dash.

But I think the N dash, you know, that one is almost indistinguishable from a hyphen.

I'll definitely give you that one.

Rob Bell:
What else would anyone like to add before we round off on knowing your dashes?

Jono Hey:
Tom, it's really good that you bring up the AI example and you tell it that not to do hyphens.

Because one of the reasons why I thought this would be a fun sketch to discuss is because M dashes, which were little known, I would generally say, suddenly came into prominence because AI would always do its responses using M dashes.

Everybody was like, hang on, most people are not using M dashes in the text, because part of the thing is most people, A, don't know exists and B, know how to type it.

Or where you should use it.

But AI was essentially trained on huge corpuses of text, and very often it was edited text, not just chats and emails and messages back and forth, casual text.

Tom Pellereau:
It was taught these rules and how to imply them.

Human would want perfection, no doubt.

Jono Hey:
Exactly.

So it was doing what is good English, I suppose.

But that was better English than most people were writing.

And so all of a sudden, it was a mega tell that people had used AI because it was using M dashes everywhere.

And for someone like me, that was quite annoying because I was using M dashes.

And all of a sudden, everybody thinks I'm using AI.

Rob Bell:
You've lost your USP, Jono.

Jono Hey:
I have.

It was all about the M dashes before, but now everybody's doing them.

Tom Pellereau:
Give us away your secret.

How do you type an M dash on a Windows or a Mac?

Rob Bell:
This is a brilliant question, Tommy, because like hyphen, easy.

I can see it there right now.

It's next to the 0, 7, 8, 9, 0, hyphen, bang, in it goes, easy.

Jono Hey:
So some programs, if you do exactly what you encountered, Tom, if you do a double hyphen and a space, that will give you the M dash.

Tom Pellereau:
Yes.

Jono Hey:
If you're on Mac, and I do this all the time, it's option shift hyphen.

Rob Bell:
I can't be bothered with that.

Tom Pellereau:
Are you kidding me?

Jono Hey:
I'll just say that it does vary by country, and obviously it also varies by language.

I was often quite surprised that text in different languages punctuate very differently.

I just assumed there was always one way of punctuating.

Rob Bell:
You're right.

Yeah.

Jono Hey:
So if you read novels in French, they won't always put quotes around the speech, for example.

Whereas, they always do in English.

In France, you'll use a decimal point as the comma in a string of numbers, leaving out like a thousand, it would be 1.000 instead of 1,000.

Tom Pellereau:
Causes me massive issues when we get the information back from our retailers in Europe.

We have to have code that converts it all back from dots to commas.

Rob Bell:
Because don't they use a comma to go into decimal places?

Jono Hey:
Yeah, exactly.

So they're actually reversed and you can look at a number and think it's a completely different one.

So my point about the hyphens and the end dashes and end dashes, it varies by country because countries and languages do very different things.

Tom Pellereau:
Thank you.

Rob Bell:
Good.

Well, listen, personally, I'm absolutely delighted that I now know which symbol is which.

The one question I do have, though, is which one is used in Morse code?

I'll leave that one out there.

Jono, Tommy, thank you once again and thank you all for listening.

Jono, did you want to say something about that?

Do you know which one it is from Morse code?

Jono Hey:
No, I don't know.

It's a great question.

This is a bit mad, but I did hear that a minus is maybe different from all of these, technically speaking.

Oh, because a minus has to be nicely in line with the equals and the times and the divide and is centered in its space alongside the width of the numbers.

So you could potentially throw in a minus here as well.

I don't even know how to type that.

Rob Bell:
Well, now that I'm looking at it, the hyphen on my keyboard is right up there with plus and equals.

So it's probably a minus rather than a hyphen.

Jono Hey:
I've been typing a minus all this time.

Rob Bell:
I could be a couple of pixels out.

Oh my gosh.

Jono Hey:
EU minus UK relations.

Rob Bell:
We'll leave it there.

Tommy, Jono, thank you once again and thank you all for listening.

Until next time, go well, stay well.

Goodbye.

All music on this podcast series is provided by the very talented Franc Cinelli.

And you can find many more tracks at franccinelli.com.