Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

- -
> > > Whoa -- a spaced en-dash is _British_ style, and a closed-up em-dash
> > > is _American_ style, and The Economist is a British magazine!
> >
> > Isn't The Economist the British magazine that also uses the US
> > convention for numbers in the billions and trillions?
>
> The UK took up that convention three decades ago or so.

Which UK, which convention? Two conventions were mentioned. You seem to mean
the dash issue. Can you please cite the authority that has the right to
express the opinion of the United Kingdom in such matters, or cite a reliable
study that shows that the population of the United Kingdom has approved such
a convention?

> Jack Lynch--zombie Irish Taoiseach teaching English at Rutgers!--says
> spaces around the dash are a matter of house
> style. http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/d.html#dash

Sorry, but anyone who writes that an em dash has the width of "m" cannot be
taken seriously in matters of dash usage. Besides, using spaces around an em
dash is just pointless (though it was previously common in Finnish too). The
spaces around an en dash compensate for the shortness of the dash as compared
with an em dash. You would mix two typographic traditions for no good reason.

The original dash issue here was the use of the em dash without spaces in a
quotation purported to be Finnish. That's simply absolutely wrong.
A quotation presented in quotation marks shall be a verbatim quotation,
including the original punctuation. (It was not a quotation at all, just a
distorted phrase.)

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist
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  • Re: Article on Finno-Ugric in the Economist
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