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See, I'm looking at this as a puzzle. Remember this one?
Woman without her man is nothing
...which can be punctuated "Woman without her man is nothing." or "Woman: Without her, man is nothing." Well, I'm looking for the same sort of surprise in this one.
You see, if you punctuate it in what seems to be the obvious way:
Em dash or en dash:
On typewriters it's easy.
On keyboards, less so.
...then it's just backward. In reality, 'em' and 'en' dashes are easy on computer keyboards (well, on computer software) but can't be done on any but the fanciest typewriters. But Glenn's quote said this haiku is "punctuationally challenged", so maybe if we figure out a different way to punctuate it the haiku will be true.
Nothing's coming to me, though.
Bob Bridges said:
See, I'm looking at this as a puzzle. Remember this one?
Woman without her man is nothing
…which can be punctuated "Woman without her man is nothing." or "Woman: Without her, man is nothing." Well, I'm looking for the same sort of surprise in this one.
You see, if you punctuate it in what seems to be the obvious way:
Em dash or en dash:
On typewriters it's easy.
On keyboards, less so.…then it's just backward. In reality, 'em' and 'en' dashes are easy on computer keyboards (well, on computer software) but can't be done on any but the fanciest typewriters. But Glenn's quote said this haiku is "punctuationally challenged", so maybe if we figure out a different way to punctuate it the haiku will be true.
Nothing's coming to me, though.
Your explanation gives me an idea. The em dash often functions as a structural colon. The en dash can be used to illustrate a relationship between two elements or ideas. Hence,
Em dash or en dash—
On typewriters it's easy–
On keyboards, less so.
In old-school typewriting, the en dash was one hyphen and the em dash was two -- easy to remember. On keyboards it's generally done with ALT+0150 (en) and ALT+0151 (em).
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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