The Em Dash --

 
Hello. I am the em dash. (—)
 
Once you get to know me, you’ll put me everywhere. I will empower you. Give you a sense of panache. Punch up your flaccid prose. I will butt into your boring sentences like an unfavored friend, the one who drops by without calling to see if you’re up for going to the bar in the middle of the day. Like that friend— and shoulder pads in women’s clothes in the 80’s—I will not add value to the situation. Between you and me, there’s nothing I can do that a simple comma won’t do just as well. That was me, by the way, with that thing about the shoulder pads. Pretty good, right? 

Few understand literary trends, and A.I. certainly does not. But A.I. loves me. Pop a paragraph into any faux intelligence for “improvement” and there I will be. Count on it. But let’s remember that friend. To get away with interruptions like that, you better be damn sexy. 

Writers who use me well don’t just bludgeon their sentences with my cutouts and call it a day. I am not a kill switch or a circuit breaker, after all. This gifted minority write the kind of stuff that justifies my suddenness. It’s vivid, messy, jagged. Like life. They justify me. They get me. If I could talk, I would look those writers in the eye and say between sobs, “you complete me.” My personal favorite use of me was in 2009, by Colum McCann in his novel, “Let the Great World Spin.” It’s a book about the guy who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Here’s the sentence. 

“He stood beyond the railing of the observation deck of the south tower—at any moment he might just take off.”

See, I don’t always come in pairs. McCann used me as a precipice. By using only one of me, he made me a loner, an outlaw, a bad boy. A punctuation mark brimming with suspense. 

Some would argue I have not been used well since.

Did you know I have a little brother? The “en” dash. Yeah, smaller than me, but bigger than our kid sister, the hyphen. The en dash is useful. Mozart’s dates, 1756–1791. The hyphen is smaller still, and functions as a marriage license between two words. Self-esteem. Mother-in-law. (If we were German, we’d just mush the words together without the ceremony.) But I’m the biggest. I’m the one you want if you really need to elbow your way into the middle of a sentence. 

Who knows how long my popularity will last. One can never put a precise figure on the phrase “his days are numbered.” But the march of time is undefeated. My expiration date will arrive and when it does, people may look back at these works of our era, contemporaneously praised for their brusque and “muscular” writing, and see them as dated. Hindsight will see me as befitting our epoch. There’s something to this. I fit well with our shrinking attention spans. I am here to interrupt your sentence with a thought that won’t wait its turn. I can be annoying in my unexpectedness. Like the 24-hour news cycle, or the startling sixty-second ad for probiotics. Someday, just as we now associate tube tops with platform shoes, I will be thought a perfect match for the delusional impatience that made an endless scrolling internet seem like a good idea.

When that day comes, I will be rendered quaint. Whatever function I had will no longer be thought worth performing. I will revert to non-existence, or retire to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe, like the shoe tree, or the hat pin. And then the people will say, with neither venom nor pity, Rest in Peace, little em dash. Rest in Peace. 

​L.H.

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