Dashes
Moved beyond his wont by our English ill-treatment of the dash, Beadnell permits himself a wail as just as it is pathetic.
'The dash is frequently employed in a very capricious and arbitrary manner, as a substitute for all sorts of points, by writers whose thoughts, although, it may be, sometimes striking and profound, are thrown together without order or dependence; also by some others, who think that they thereby give prominence and emphasis to expressions which in themselves are very commonplace, and would, without this fictitious assistance, escape the observation of the reader, or be deemed by him hardly worthy of notice.'
It is all only too true; these are the realms of Chaos, and the lord of them is Sterne, from whom modern writers of the purely literary kind have so many of their characteristics. Wishing for an example, we merely opened the first volume of Tristram Shandy at a venture, and 'thus the Anarch old With faltering speech and visage incomposed Answered':
—Observe, I determine nothing upon this.—My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell;—not with a pedantic fescue,—or in the decisive manner of Tacitus, who outwits himself and his reader;—but with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;—to them I write,—and by them I shall be read,—if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold out so long,—to the very end of the world.–Sterne.
The modern newspaper writer who overdoes the use of dashes is seldom as incorrect as Sterne, but is perhaps more irritating:
There are also a great number of people—many of them not in the least tainted by militarism—who go further and who feel that a man in order to be a complete man—that is, one capable of protecting his life, his country, and his civil and political rights—should acquire as a boy and youth the elements of military training,—that is, should be given a physical training of a military character, including...–Spectator.
It must be added, however, that Beadnell himself helps to make things worse, by countenancing the strange printer's superstition that (,—) is beautiful to look upon, and (—,) ugly.
Under these circumstances we shall have to abandon our usual practice of attending only to common mistakes, and
