Julia Allison, Eat Your Heart Out

Editors:

William Safire is running scared, haunted by the specter of the en dash. Crumbling under the evident shame of his foray into "postpartisan" stylistics, he waxes inoffensive this week in a Clinton-tinged bit on "bird-dog minutes" and their rhetorical reappropriation. Fair enough: Safire has realized, or been shown, that punctuation is utterly outside his purview, and he will restrict attention to language as such or face the consequences.

But traces of last week's backfire impregnate the bird-doggery at hand: they circulate, collide, and threaten to implode the whole sorry exercise. As Safire hedges and triangulates, looking over his parenthetical shoulder at the recent farce — "nonpartisan (not postpartisan[!!])" — and welcoming, again within the safety of parentheses, a one-off exchange with his beleaguered copy His refusal to give explicit justification for the hyphen in "bird-dog minute" or, for that matter, in "bird-dog" the verb, would under other circumstances be a refreshing endorsement of his readers' presence of mind — compound adjectives, different usage, etc., etc. — but here it merely throws into relief Safire's meekness, his fear, his outright humiliation and final acknowledgement that one man's syndicated meta-pedantry is another's common sense. editor, he appears more emaciated and discreditable than ever.

Sad though it is to see a columnist of Safire's putative stature, or at least age, curl up in resignation, these foregoing moments mold only the general affect of this latest entry "On Language," not its moment of critical collapse beneath the deferred pressure of the en dash — and his proven inability to cope with it. As he trails off, cold-shouldered by the Clinton camp, surrendering to the (consistently impressive) Dictionary of American Regional English, he foretells the many "dialectical delights" lurking behind the etymology he refuses to investigate. Not "dialectal," linguists' preferred term for all things of or pertaining to dialects, but "dialectical," that philosophical catchall cherished (and, admittedly, abused) by enough of Safire's academic–political enemies to fill the University of Wisconsin several times over. Certainly "dialectical" can refer to dialects, but the word is so colored (overdetermined?) by theoretical currents from Moscow to Frankfurt to the Left Bank and beyond as to render its plain-clothes linguistic application comical, a quiet kowtow to the en dash's transformative promise, which Safire conspicuously flouted last week. But perhaps this is just what the author so quietly aspires to harness.

The en dash, in a selected category of usage, summons a vibrant, polyvalent, and entirely value-neutral dialectic between the terms it links. Whereas the hyphen routinely venerates hierarchy — understood in at least a grammatical sense: prescribed order of words — the en dash levels it. "Singer–songwriter," to take a familiar example, could just as easily, and as correctly, be "songwriter–singer": the terms are on equal footing, and any conventional ordering we maintain is only that — conventional. Singer and songwriter: it is a simple, unmarked pairing. It is infinitely and productively reversible, always in motion or pointing toward its possibility: dialectical. And in those en-dash cases which manifestly do report hierarchy — "master–slave," for example, from Safire's good friend Hegel — the imbalance is no fault of the punctuation, but of the terms themselves. See also "philosopher–king," "work–life balance," "Clinton–Obama": "and," "with," even "versus," but always corralled into a dynamic relationship that demands consideration on its own terms while demanding the aggressive scrutiny of each individual term, its fissures, its overlaps, its vulnerabilities. The en dash is, in this way, the escape route from the ideology presupposed by the catchall hyphen that installs and reproduces and renders unquestionable an entire legion of hierarchies.

Why did he do it? Ever the sober linguist, why not say "dialectal"? Why sacrifice precision; why wander down the tortuous theoretical road of the dialectic? Last week, monkeying with "postpartisanism," Safire sinned upon disavowing a different en dash. His frustration over the phrase "post-baby boom" could easily have been resolved: the en dash can stand in for a hyphen when multiple words are being joined on one side. Functionally, "post–baby boom" is quite apart from the delights enabled in the internal workings of, say, "philosopher–king." But one context of use associatively slips toward the next, and Safire's "dialectical" proclivities this week suggest that he was ready, apprehensive, for this crucial step all along.

Leaving a trail of wreckage on account of his tenuous, overextended work with hyphens, and now jittery at the prospect that this might be his legacy, Safire seeks refuge. This week's bird-dog column is not only the pitiable capitulation of a punctuational know-nothing; it is a cry for help. That help lies in the en dash — help that the hyphen-wise, en dash–foolish Times, strangling expression by the day, seems unwilling to supply.

Peter Ekman
Queens

BREAKING... B. Hussein Obama Wants to Eat Your Puppy

Whoever's running Hillary's oppo department should be fired immediately. Because obviously no one in this country cares anymore about what you inhaled or even insufflated as a boy. But while the interns were paper-cutting themselves through Dreams from My Father searching for crack, everyone seemed to have missed the shocking admission on page 37 of the memoir, recounting Barry's childhood in Indonesia:

...I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner...and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat...

!!!!!! Apparently, Snoopy tastes "tough." I'm just as tolerant as the next guy, but America is not ready for a dog-eater in the White House. Of course the media's not asking the tough question on this. But make no mistake: a vote for canine-fusion cuisine is a vote for the end of the Enlightenment. Ugh, I can't look at him now without seeing the tail wagging in his disgusting flabby stomach. How could you?

Are you there, Daddy? It's me, Matilda.

Sorry, that was in hideous taste.

Fit for a Meme.

Associates of the 'dasher know that for months now, yours "seriously profound" truly has been periodically crowing about HRC's uncanny evocation of Eva Peron, or at least the Madonna version I've seen dancing once with Antonio Banderas. Surely, I thought, someone would pick up on the resemblance to the similarly blond, two-for-the-price-of-one, mostly fascist, vaguely tubercular former first lady of Argentina. [The difference being Evita actually achieved something resembling universal health care.]

But even as Hillary cleverly tweaked the old Rice–Webber standard for her "Don't Cry for Me [Crying for You], New Hampshire" routine, the MSM ignored it all, seemingly content with the obvi casting of Obama as Jesus Christ Superstar. (Ron Paul is Cats.) Well, thanks to an offhand and off-putting comment from a Clinton aide-de-camp, the story's finally hit the big time this week:

The Evita Factor [New York mag]

And Starring Hillary Clinton as Eva Peron [Slate]

Since said MSM has to come up with silly reasons to point out the fact that one thing looks like another thing, the idea in the above is that Latinos, grown up in a culture of dynastic lady leaders like Evita, are predisposed to support Hillary. (Why this hasn't made her poll numbers higher among gay men and 16-year-old girls from New Jersey, no one could say.) Also, like most things Clinton nowadays, it's both racist and illogically so: last time I checked, wasn't the stereotype machismo?

Well, I suppose those people do really love their mothers. Wait, that's the Italians. Which, incidentally, is what Madonna is. Oh, swarth is so hard to parse!

A Writer Living in Queens...

Editors:

William Safire's send-up of "postpartisan" politics and their nomenclature marks a notable improvement on the last major Times entry on the hyphenation beat, Charles McGrath's ill-begotten musings from October 7, "Death-Knell. Or Death Knell." Where McGrath smugly assumed, on the basis of the OED's sudden elimination of 16,000 antiquated hyphens ("bumblebee," "crybaby" – musty forms viscerally awkward in Century 21), the wholesale erosion of the hyphen as such, without regard for context, function, or flavor, Safire is more in tune with the incremental nature of punctuational change: when tentative and new, a term might carry a hyphen, then surrender it with increasing familiarity. McGrath evinced a muted recognition of this process, yet the uptake of his piece — O, controversy! — was, repulsively, that a macro-level flight from the hyphen would prevent new new terms from ever starting out with one.

Safire knows, as McGrath doesn't, that not all hyphens are created equal: the grammatical and the stylistic kinds are simply not subject to the same tectonic forces. His parenthetical is comforting: the just among us, and the strong, speak of ice-cream trucks, hot-dog stands, and, yes, hat-trick hyphenated usages. The sort of hyphens that birth compound adjectives belong to a qualitatively different category from those cobbling together neologisms; if they are to disappear, it will be for reasons unaligned with the puncture of "water-beds."

Yet Safire is entirely too content to guard his impish dance on "post[-]partisanship" behind the slogan of "style, not grammar." A slew of factors constrain our punctuation, liberating though the mirage of free choice may seem. Of course the hyphen in "post-partisan" is immaterial; the hyphen is really no more there in any essential way than the hyphen that could crop up at a line break between syllables. But this ambiguous presence does not authorize the term's division into "post partisan": while the base "partisan" may trace its lineage to the Latin, it is not a term directly plucked from Latin in the way that "partum," another of Safire's examples, most assuredly is. Foreign terms remain unhyphenated — a priori, bona fide, and so on — even when modifying; they are outside the realm of our punctuational caprice.

Safire seems so eager, in fact, to tie the lesson into a neat hat trick and be done with it (or simply blockaded by a word limit — shame in either case) that he misfires irrevocably when it comes to the 2006 Times quote on Barack Obama. The third term, "post-baby boom," is indeed awkward: the meaning is distorted and divorced from the intent, and we're left squawking about "post-babies." Certainly, this "hyphen before a phrase" does not accomplish everything we had hoped.

But it happens that we already have a punctuation mark for precisely such a situation: the en dash. En dashes operate in three main contexts: ranges (2001–08; A–Z), substitutes for hyphens when multiple words are linked on one side (post–baby boom; pre–World War II; trans fat–free), and the non-hierarchical yet dynamic linkage of terms in the spirit of "and," "with," "to," or "versus" (see Safire's egregious fourth paragraph: it should be "Ford–Carter," just as it would be "U.S.–Mexico," "Giants–Patriots," "military–industrial," and so on). Longer than a hyphen but shorter than an em dash, the kind that signals a pause in speech, the en dash is a powerful tool, albeit one foreign to The Times (and, unthinkably, even the Magazine — glossies across the board employ it). So what we are left with is not a question of hyphen versus no hyphen — the care[-]free situation of "postpartisan" — but rather hyphen versus en dash. Safire misdiagnoses the source of "post-baby boom"'s awkwardness. For intuitive reasons, no one would consider writing "postbaby boom." His following sentence, regarding the Washington news media, is an utter non sequitur; it operates along an unrelated axis.

Whether the fundamental blame rests on Safire or his crusty (copy)editors might seem purely academic, but the fifth paragraph dispels any doubts: the author appears in willful oblivion of the fertile crossroads of style and grammar, and ultimately unconcerned with questions of the distribution of meaning, a fact which alone disqualifies him from writing on this topic in the first place. Safire's introduction of "bi-partisanship" quietly presents a foil to his stated ruminations on the "post-partisan" condition. The problem is the "-ship" bringing up the rear. When only one hyphen lurks in an expression, it always imposes a bifurcation in how we parse the meaning. Here, "bipartisanship," unhyphenated, carries a special ambiguity. Imagine a silenced hyphen before "ship": we have three units of meaning to reckon with, and as a result the hyphen after "bi" is not purely stylistic. "Bi-partisanship," strictly, denotes a state of two partisanships, not a state of bipartisan politics or feeling. ("Postpartisanship" is relatively unproblematic: the situation described is both a situation ("ship") in which a type of politics called "postpartisan" prevail and a time or situation past the concept of "partisanship.") If we are committed for stylistic reasons always to insert a hyphen after a prefix, and if we also mean to describe a state of bipartisan attitudes, then perhaps an en dash would be most appropriate: bi-partisan–ship.

This may be moot beneath the paper's tyranny of typesetting, a consistently vague and undemocratic campaign to foist the hyphen upon en dash–appropriate contexts, but it is not insignificant in a broader sense. Safire has so assimilated the publication's ideological apparatus — if there is no en dash, all is permitted — as to reproduce similar fraught hierarchies within apparently neutral illustrative examples. He may himself write this off as so much speculation, a mere artifact of The Times' punctuational inertia, but this would be to surrender responsiblity for what amounts not simply to a slackening, but to a new and frightful hierarchy of meaning.

Peter Ekman
Queens