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It seems we're always declaring our great fondness for this punctuation mark or that one. Oh, the whimsical nature of the semicolon and how smart she makes us feel. Oh, the gorgeous curves of the ampersand, and its space-saving capabilities. Oh, the em-dash, the em-dash, the em-dash! This is all well and good and highly enjoyable; who doesn't love waxing poetic over an ellipses, or wondering what the exclamation point does when it's not on the road, traveling with the band? But let's take a minute to get Grammar-Real: It has come to my attention of late that many of us are using hyphens wrong. This is not, of course, the hyphen's fault. This is what's known as human frailty, likely caused by some sort of ill-conceived deep hubris.
While we bow to the elegance of the em-dash (hats off to you, lovely madam) and admire the skillful writer who knows how to employ the unicorn that is the en-dash (a very special mark, learn more about his charms here), the commonplace hyphen is everywhere and nowhere, a generic entity oft subbed for the real thing (i.e., the em- or en-dash), used willy-nilly, thrown in when one feels like it, as if it's salt or pepper being added to a stew. It is not! It is a hyphen. It should not just be added -- added --- added - and the reader then tasked with making heads or tails of it, too-salty, not-enough-seasoning, simply-wrong. And when it is used as a hyphen, for the express purpose of hyphenating something, it's often wrong, too. This-is-so-very-jarring.