Talk Like An Opera Geek: Vocal Tricks And Trills (from NPR Music)

Tom Huizenga, on NPR Music’s “Deceptive Cadence” blog, attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.

 

Talk Like An Opera Geek: Vocal Tricks And Trills

Categories: Confessions Of An Operaholic

November 3, 2011

(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)

Baffled by buffo? Talking about opera can be like walking through a linguistic thicket.

Baffled by buffo? Talking about opera can be like walking through a linguistic thicket.

Ever been to a cocktail party and feel totally lost when some know-it-all opera jerk spouts on about “the mezzo-soprano’s ornamentation in the cabaletta lacked a certain bel canto sensibility, and because of the high tessitura, she sounded like little more than a comedia dell’arte soubrette in her secco recitative.”

Fear not. Read on — and hear the musical excerpts — and you’ll be able to fire back with opera jargon of your own and actually have some idea of what you’re talking about.

Opera — like wine, baseball or deep sea diving — has its own special vernacular which we’ll try to decode and disentangle. In the coming weeks we’ll tackle opera styles, voice and role types, and general musical palaver.

To fire up the series, this week we’ll break down a few vocal tricks and styles of singing.

Got any jargon you would like deciphered? Let us know in the comments section.

Talking Opera: Vocal Tricks And Trills

Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli

Coloratura

  • Artist: Cecilia Bartoli
  • Album: Sacrificium [Deluxe Edition]
  • Song: Berenice, opera [Cadrò, ma qual si mira]

With a set of vocal cords that can fire off flurries of notes like a tommy gun, mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli is well-equipped to handle the speed and agility that are the calling cards of coloratura. Daredevil runs up and down the scale, punctuated with high notes, characterize a style that began in the baroque era and still thrives today. The word can refer to both the style and the singer.

Tenor John McCormack

Mezza Voce

  • Artist: John McCormack
  • Album: In Opera: Prima Voce
  • Song: Manon, opera in 5 acts [Il sogno]

This term literally means “half voice.” Sounds simple, right? But it’s disappointing that today so few singers have mastered it. You have to sing at half volume and still be heard in the back row. That requires full breath support, steering clear of anything that resembles crooning. Here, the Irish tenor John McCormack effortlessly glides into a perfect mezza voce.

Soprano Joan Sutherland

Trill

  • Artist: Joan Sutherland
  • Album: La Stupenda: The Supreme Voice of Joan Sutherland
  • Song: Les contes d’Hoffmann, opera in 4 acts [Les oiseaux dans la charmille]

A true trill is harder than it might seem. Technically, it’s the rapid alternation of a note and the next note above it, keeping the ground between them nice and clean. Joan Sutherland was, as you might say, licensed to trill. She had a unique combination of power and flexibility.

Soprano Leontyne Price

Messa di Voce

  • Artist: Leontyne Price
  • Album: Highlights
  • Song: La forza del destino, opera [Act 4: Pace, pace, mio Dio!]

A killer messa di voce, which essentially involves the attack of a sustained tone, includes three phases. The tone must start soft (pianissimo), then swell much louder (to fortissimo) and then slowly decrease in volume back to the original softness. For decades, soprano Leontyne Price basically owned this maneuver at the opening “Pace, pace mio dio” from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino.

Countertenor David Daniels.

Falsetto

  • Artist: David Daniels
  • Album: Handel: Operatic Arias
  • Song: Giulio Cesare in Egitto, opera, HWV 17 [Cara speme]

Almost anyone can sing in falsetto (hence Tiny Tim), but some male opera singers make gorgeous sounds in the female register. They are called countertenors, and David Daniels is among the finest, with no trace of the hooty quality that sometimes comes with the high-flying vocal territory.

Understanding Chinglish: A new play tries to bridge the language gap

A piece by my friend Damian Fowler on the BBC News online magazine.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15471753

 

 

Understanding Chinglish: A new play tries to bridge the language gap

26 October 2011

Chinglish tells the story of a struggling American businessman trying to win a Chinese business contract, with amusing consequences

A new play is bringing to light what is lost in translation between residents of China and the English-speaking world. Damian Fowler finds out just how art imitates life.

Mandarin has arrived on the Broadway stage thanks to a new play called Chinglish, which explores the communication gap between the English-speaking world and China. It is a bilingual play, written in a mix of English and Mandarin, surely a first in the history of Broadway.

A sign in front of a river that reads "no turning over, Please"
A sign in Chinglish by the Yangzi river

Written by the playwright David Henry Hwang, Chinglish is a comedy with a ripped-from-the-headlines theme. It tells the story of a struggling American businessman who finds himself in a provincial city in China, trying to win a contract to make signs for public buildings.

The play explores the language barrier that separates the businessman from his Chinese counterparts who can make or break the deal.

Hwang, a Chinese-American who does not speak Chinese, felt inspired to write the play after his own business trips to China.

“I’ve been going to China a fair amount over the last five or six years, mostly because China has become interested in Broadway musicals and I happen to be the only nominally Chinese who’s ever written a Broadway show,” says Hwang, referring to his play M Butterfly, which won him a Tony Award in 1988.

In China he could not help but notice the “absurdly translated signs” of Chinese into English – otherwise known as Chinglish.

Naively literal, the signs garble English into hilariously strange phrases: one, outside a bathroom for disabled people read as “Deformed Man’s Toilet”.

Other examples were equally baffling:

  • False Alarm! became The Siren Lies!
  • Slippery When Wet! was Be Mindful of the Juicy Surfaces!
  • Don’t Feed the Birds! now read The Fowl Cannot Eat!

But the miscommunication between cultures runs deeper than words, says Mr Hwang.

“Chinglish is about attempts to communicate across cultures and the barriers that separate us, and the most superficial of those is language.

“But then sometimes even if you’re speaking the words literally you may as well be speaking a different language because some of the underlying cultural assumptions are so different.”

Admiration and anxietyOf the seven people in the cast, six are bilingual, either Chinese or Chinese-American actors.

Actress Jennifer Lim plays Xi Yan, a fierce local official who holds the keys to the American’s deal. For her, Chinglish is a truly cross-cultural play.

Sign that says Under Escalator Prohibition
An example of Chinglish in the Shenyang airport

“Growing up I found myself in numerous situations where I’ve had to translate for relatives,” says Lim, who was born in Hong Kong and then educated in Britain and the United States.

“If you speak the Chinese language the Chinglish makes a lot of sense!”

British actor Stephen Pucci, who speaks both English and Mandarin, plays a shady British expat who tries to broker the deal. Pucci has watched the rise of China as a global power with fascination, and admires the play’s topical themes.

“I think it’s definitely going to tap into something and encourage mutual awareness and understanding,” he says. “Whether that understanding will be completely and wholly mutual we will see.”

Chinglish opens at a moment in history when two important world powers, the US and China, are observing each other warily – there is admiration and anxiety on both sides.

“There are expansive differences between Chinese and American culture,” says Leigh Silverman, the director of Chinglish. “It’s essential that we figure out how to contend with each other and I think that’s a part of what the play is exploring.”

Last year, Silverman traveled with Hwang and the play’s producers to Guizhou, a city of four million in south-western China, where the play is set. They were chaperoned by husband-and-wife cultural advisers, Joanna Lee and Ken Smith, who set up business meetings, dinner dates and tours for the creative team.

In addition, the duo helped find original props for the play to make it as authentic as possible. For example, they brought in the framed calligraphy which adorns the stage – including a banner featured in a restaurant scene reading: “Good eating and drinking means good morals.”

Cultural blundersMr Smith and Ms Lee run Museworks, a consultancy connecting performing arts professionals between America, Europe and Asia. They understand the complications of doing business in China and have saved many a business professional from making cultural blunders.

“It is true that you’re finding American businessman, British businessman really in the middle of nowhere in China, in the middle of nowhere in India,” says Ms Lee.

“How do they navigate? How do they find their hotel room, get the support on the ground to get their deal done?”

One of the most important principles to understand when doing business in China is the concept of “guanxi” – pronounced “gwanshee” – which refers to the system of social networks and influential relationships that can facilitate business and other dealings.

“When you talk about guanxi in business it really talks about people you know in advance who have the same goals, same ideals and same way of working as you,” says Mr Smith.

Guanxi even supersedes the significance of the business contract in China, according to the pair.

So, a Westerner doing business in China should expect to spend a lot of time wining and dining their Chinese counterparts to get the deal done. “Once one deal comes through and it’s successful, people tend to stick together. The guanxi continues and strengthens,” says Ms Lee.

In this regard Chinglish and its take on contemporary China is very much of the moment.

That does not mean it is without risk. After all, “Penetration will be dealt with painfully” can really mean “Trespassers will be prosecuted”.

Grammatical tweeting – by songbirds?

An article in Scientific American suggests that the rules of grammar aren’t necessarily unique to us humans. It seems that birds’ tweets are as grammatical as ours – and I would suggest they’re prettier, too.

Are birds’ tweets grammatical?

By Danielle Perszyk

October 28, 2011

Are humans the only species with enough smarts to craft a language? Most of us believe that we are. Although many animals have their own form of communication, none has the depth or versatility heard in human speech. We are able to express almost anything on our mind by uttering a few sounds in a particular order. Human language has a flexibility and complexity that seems to be universally shared across cultures and, in turn, contributes to the variation and richness we find among human cultures.

But are the rules of grammar unique to human language? Perhaps not, according to a recent study, which showed that songbirds may also communicate using a sophisticated grammar—a feature absent in even our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates.

Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University performed a series of experiments to determine whether Bengalese finches expect the notes of their tunes to follow a certain order. To test this possibility, Abe and Watanabe took advantage of a behavioral response called habituation, where animals zone-out when exposed to the same stimulus over and over again.

In each experiment, the birds were presented with the same songs until they became familiarized with the tune. The researchers then created novel songs by shuffling the notes around. But not every new song caught the birds’ attention; rather, the finches increased response calls only to songs with notes arranged in a particular order, suggesting that the birds used common rules when forming the syntax of that song. When the researchers created novel songs with even more complicated artificial grammar—for example, songs that mimicked a specific feature found in human (Japanese) language—the birds still only responded to songs that followed the rules.

 

Because the birds responded strongly to tunes ordered with certain structure, even when this structure was artificially constructed, the research team determined that the finches were able to spontaneously learn new grammar. This ability, though, seemed to be dependent upon their social context.

Birds isolated as babies from other birds were still able to learn artificial rules of grammar, but they failed to respond to songs with modified syntax—that is, normal Bengalese finch songs with the notes shuffled. However, after being reintroduced to other birds, it took them only two weeks to learn to respond to the shuffled songs, indicating that the birds needed to hear other birds’ songs to absorb the precise rules of Bengalese finch grammar.

While birdsong has long been known to share similarities with human language, the ability to convey different bits of information by simply rearranging word order was thought to be exclusively human.

This study revealed that Bengalese finches can learn grammar and, furthermore, that their grammatical abilities involve a specific part of the brain region distinct from other brain regions involved in singing. This is similar to what neuroscientists understand about human language processing.

If the tweets of birds can be roughly likened to strings of human words, and if birdbrains process songs in a way similar to how human brains process language, future research may tackle whether these animals possess other cognitive abilities once thought to be singularly characteristic of human intelligence. The next time you hear a bird chirping outside your window, you might think twice about what’s going on inside his little birdbrain.

Images: photos by BS Thurner Hof and Kclama at Wikimedia Commons. Graphic of the brain, provided by the author.

WSJ piece ‘on the misuse of apostrophe’s (did your eye just twitch?)’ …

This piece in the Wall Street Journal takes a stroll through the history of punctuation marks and looks at how they have evolved – or in some cases become extinct – as the usage and culture of language, and even its platforms, have changed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet

 

Is This the Future of Punctuation!?

On the misuse of apostrophe’s (did your eye just twitch?) and our increasingly rhetorical language

By HENRY HITCHINGS

Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise “Rest Room’s” or “Puppy’s For Sale.”

People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.

LANGUAGE

LANGUAGE

Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.

Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.

Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.

Other marks enjoyed briefer success. There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow ; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it. Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera . It appears in 8th-century manuscripts, separating text from commentary, and after a period out of fashion it made an unexpected return in early printed books. Then it faded from view.

Another mark, now obscure, is the point d’ironie, sometimes known as a “snark.” A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d’ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback.

In fact, Internet culture generally favors a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. True, emoticons have sprung up to convey nuances of mood and tone. Moreover, typing makes it easy to amplify punctuation: splattering 20 exclamation marks on a page, or using multiple question marks to signify theatrical incredulity. But, overall, punctuation is being renounced.

How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness.

Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief.

Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.

One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That’s what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand.

By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that’s also a connector—but it’s a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.

More surprising is the eclipse of the hyphen. Traditionally, it has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen’s last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role.

Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens. They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe. This little squiggle first appeared in an English text in 1559. Its use has never been completely stable, and today confusion leads to the overcompensation that we see in those handwritten signs. The alternative is not to use apostrophes at all—an act of pragmatism easily mistaken for ignorance.

Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.

The apostrophe is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear. And while I plan to keep handling apostrophes in accordance with the principles I was shown as a child, I am confident that they will either disappear or be reduced to little baubles of orthographic bling.

—Mr. Hitchings’s latest book. “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English,” will be published in November.

When insults had class…

These glorious and eloquent insults are from the good old days when our armory of linguistic weapons extended beyond 4-letter expletives, frowny faces made out of punctuation marks, and screaming caps … And, what’s more, they’re eminently stealable, since most of their authors are long gone.


 

  • A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.”

“That depends, Sir,” said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

 

  • “He had delusions of adequacy.” – Walter Kerr

 

  • “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” – Winston Churchill

 

  • “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”  Clarence Darrow

 

  • “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

 

  • “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” – Moses Hadas

 

  • “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” – Mark Twain

 

  • “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” – Oscar Wilde

 

  • “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” – George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night. Will attend second … if there is one.” –  Winston Churchill, in response.

 

  • “I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” – Stephen Bishop

 

  • “He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” – John Bright

 

  • “I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” – Irvin S. Cobb

 

  • “He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” – Samuel Johnson

 

  • “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” – Paul Keating

 

  • “In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” – Charles, Count Talleyrand

 

  • “He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” – Forrest Tucker

 

  • “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” – Mark Twain

 

  • “His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” – Mae West

 

  • “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” – Oscar Wilde

 

  • “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” – Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

 

  • “He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” – Billy Wilder

 

  • “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” – Groucho Marx

 

 

It’s National Punctuation Day … ! : )

It’s September 24: National Punctuation Day!! To celebrate, I’m going to indulge in my slightly weird form of synesthesia that has to do with commas and colons. I know: the brains of most synesthetes come alive with colors and personalities when they rest their eyes on numbers or letters; well, in my case it’s punctuation that does the trick — and not just when ‘:’ + ‘)’ = : ) … Here are a few of the characters that dance in my head when my eyes alight on these sentence markers.

The lowly, overused comma is both modest and attention-seeking, hoping to get noticed enough to make the reader pause for breath, but not enough, for the most part, to cause alarm, distraction, or closure. One of the most vital and possibly even the most argued-about little guys in our armory of written symbols, he plods along and does his job, bravely and unobtrusively, without too much fuss.

The passionate exclamation mark! So full of exuberance and life! And youthfulness! And sometimes uselessness! Used in excess by every teenager and texter! A shot of grammatical caffeine!!!

The underused colon: anticipating, leading, prodding: what explanation or surprise is going to follow it: where is it taking us? So often hijacked and substituted by its less pointed cousin, the comma, the colon looks and thinks forward: what’s next?

The stately and slightly smug semi-colon lords over the comma with its more majestic and powerful pause; without bringing closure, it begs us to stay with the thought; it teases us with the idea that there might be closure; but there’s more. Like a dominant chord before the final tonic, it keeps us dangling and hanging on until the denouement: the period.

The melancholy little ellipsis, which trails off into silence … Never really finishing its thought, but inviting speculation and ambiguity … Sometimes just inquisitive, other times provocative, it gives pause, and invites the reader to draw his own conclusions … A more classy version of the typewritten smiley face, the ellipsis hints at irony, jest, and sometimes it even flirts …

The mad professor’s dash — unable to stay on topic and always ready for an aside — livens and colors the flow of thought. Although it has to be used sparingly — too many dashes in a sentence cause distraction and confusion — its job is unique and can’t be delegated to the more pedestrian comma. No — the dash has some of the exclamation point’s vitality and elan. We write fluently and logically, following a steady stream of thoughts  — and then the dash interrupts us, but it can’t be ignored.

~~~~~~~~~

Here’s how National Punctuation Day suggests that we celebrate this important day. And remember: don’t overdo it.

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/celebrate.html

Here’s a game plan for your celebration of National Punctuation Day®. A few words of caution: Don’t overdo it.

  • Sleep late.
  • Take a long shower or bath.
  • Go out for coffee and a bagel (or two).
  • Read a newspaper and circle all of the punctuation errors you find (or think you find, but aren’t sure) with a red pen.
  • Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.
  • Stop in those stores to correct the owners.
  • If the owners are not there, leave notes.
  • Visit a bookstore and purchase a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
  • Look up all the words you circled.
  • Congratulate yourself on becoming a better written communicator.
  • Go home.
  • Sit down.
  • Write an error-free letter to a friend.
  • Take a nap. It has been a long day.

The English pleaded, the Scots pled

“

NewsOK ran this interesting article earlier today about the past participles and past tenses of weak and strong (or irregular) verbs, and variations in their usage amongst the Brits.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on ‘hung’ and ‘hanged’, ‘sung’ and ‘sang’, ‘lighted’ and ‘lit’, and other treacherous conjugations. Stay tuned for more on this murky subject of the past tense … Continue reading →

The Oxford comma: love it, hate it, or don’t care?

The Guardian takes a lighthearted look at one of Oxford’s most controversial exports.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/03/pass-notes-oxford-comma?INTCMP=SRCH

Pass notes No 3,002: The Oxford comma

Elitist and irritating, or useful and precise? All you need to know about the controversial punctuation mark

Sunday 3 July 2011

Age: As old as the hills, Methuselah, and time itself.

Appearance: Looks just like any other comma.

So what makes it different? It’s rarer, only appearing after the penultimate item in a list of three or more objects, and even then only as and when the writer feels it necessary. Many won’t use it all, considering it ugly, elitist, and redundant. See?

Gah, it’s just a waste of a very small amount of ink. Which is why Oxford University’s PR team now advise their staff not to use it, a decision that kicked off a Twitter-storm of pedantic debate when it was mistakenly reported that publishers Oxford University Press had elected to put its beloved punctuation mark out to pasture. It has not.

But why does anyone care? You’re not the first to ask that question. In fact, it was posed publicly three years ago, in slightly swearier tones, by indie pop band Vampire Weekend, with their single Oxford Comma.

And the answer was? Because it saves confusion.

How so? Well, say I tell you that this week I’ve been listening to two of the most over-rated bands in the world, Vampire Weekend and the Killers. Without the wee Oxonian squiggle, that will read as if I’ve listened to just two bands and they’re both over-rated.

And with it? Pop in an Oxford comma and it’s all hunky-dory; I’ve listened to four bands and Vampire Weekend deserve every well-won scrap of their critical acclaim. Similarly, in a list containing conjoined items (bacon and egg, ladies and gentlemen, French and Saunders), the use of the OxCom can be a life-saver.

As you found out while listening to Beirut, Noah and The Whale and Vampire Weekend? Exactly. Although “The Whale and Vampire Weekend” sounds like an awesome band.

And an awesome weekend. True, true, and true.

Do say: “They’re divisive, annoying, and often unnecessary, but there is a time and a place for them.”

Don’t say: “Plus they do have some catchy tunes.”

Prose interrupted — yet again

A wonderfully thorough, entertaining and helpful article in Slate magazine about the rising epidemic of the dastardly em dash — and how we can cure it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2295413/

The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash

Modern prose doesn’t need any more interruptions—seriously.

By Noreen Malone

Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2011, at 4:32 PM ET

Emily Dickinson. Click image to expand.

 

According to the Associated Press Stylebook—Slate‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon—and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot—or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose—in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels—is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.

What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?

Nope—or that’s my take, anyway. Now, I’m the first to admit—before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments—that I’m no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn’t want to make just a bit longer—and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times’ associate managing editor for standards—Philip B. Corbett, for the record—wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. “Reminded me of our battles over long dashes,” he wrote—and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t on the anti-dash side back then. But as I’ve read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit—I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible—and so I’m trying to quit.

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)

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Perhaps, in some way, the recent rise of the dash—and this “trend” is just anecdotal observation; I admit I haven’t found a way to crunch the numbers—is a reaction to our attention-deficit-disordered culture, in which we toggle between tabs and ideas and conversations all day. An explanation is not an excuse, though—as Corbett wrote in another sensible harangue against the dash, “Sometimes a procession of such punctuation is a hint that a sentence is overstuffed or needs rethinking.” Why not try for clarity in our writing—if not our lives?

It’s unclear—even among the printing community—when the em dash came into common usage. Folklore—if you’re willing to trust it—holds that it’s been around since the days of Gutenberg but didn’t catch on until at least the 1700s because the em dash wasn’t used in the Bible, and thus was considered an inferior bit of punctuation. The symbol derives its name from its width—approximately equal to an m—and is easily confused with its close cousin the en dash, used more frequently across the pond, but here meant only to offset sports scores and the like. The em dash isn’t easily formed on computers—it requires some special keystrokes on both PCs and Macs—and so I will admit that at least some of my bile comes from, as a copy editor, endlessly changing other writers’ sloppy em-dash simulacra (the double dash, the single offset dash) to the real thing.

Perhaps the most famous dash-user in history—though she didn’t use the em dash conventionally—was Emily Dickinson. According to the essay “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation” from a 1993 edition of The Emily Dickinson Journal—a true general-interest read!—”Dickinson’s excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit.” Can there really be—at the risk of sounding like a troglodyte—something feminine about the use of a dash, some sort of lighthearted gossamer quality? Compare Dickinson’s stylistic flitting with the brutally short sentences of male writers—Hemingway, for instance—who, arguably, use their clipped style to evoke taciturn masculinity. Henry Fielding apparently rewrote his sister Sarah’s work heavily to edit out some of her idiosyncrasies—chief among them, a devotion to the dash. In Gore Vidal’s Burr, the title character complains—in a charming internal monologue—”Why am I using so many dashes? Like a schoolgirl. The dash is the sign of a poor style. Jefferson used to hurl them like javelins across the page.” So is the rise of the dash related—as everything seems to be these days—to the End of Men? (I kid—calm down.)

More likely, it’s the lack of hard-and-fast usage rules—even the AP’s guidelines are more suggestions than anything—that makes the dash so popular in our post-sentence-diagramming era. According to Lynne Truss—the closest thing we’ve got to a celebrity grammarian, thanks to her best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves—people use the em dash because “they know you can’t use it wrongly—which for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue.”

So, fine, the em dash is easy to turn to—any port will do in a storm. But if you want to make your point—directly, with clarity, and memorably—I have some advice you’d do well to consider. Leave the damn em dash alone.

All in the family? Not descriptively …

Entering a subway car on a recent morning commute, I spotted Tovi — the 8-year-old son of my ex-husband (and half-brother to my daughters) — in a gaggle of school-children embarking on a field trip. Tovi, delighted to see a familiar face and eager to introduce his fellow trip-mates and chaperones to me, tugged on his teacher’s sleeve to get her attention. Pointing at me and using his best public voice, he declared proudly: “You know my sister? Well – that’s her mother!” You could see consternation and confusion knotting the brows of our fellow subway riders as they tried to work through this familial conundrum, giving way to amused smiles of understanding as the logic eventually sank in.

In this day and age of widespread divorce, remarriage, blended and not-so-blended families, children born out-of-wedlock etc., it’s curious that we haven’t yet found a word or expression to describe this increasingly common relationship: the one between kids and their parents’ erstwhile partners. “The son of my ex-husband and his second wife” is excruciatingly long-winded; all credit to Tovi for explaining our connection so succinctly. Why not invent a “divboy”, a “sibmom”, or a “momexdude”? Does divorce create such a divide that it’s even linguistically unbreachable?

A friend recently pointed out that we also lack words to describe the combo of niece(s) and nephew(s) — or aunt(s) and uncle(s) — when we’re referring to a collection or pairing of both. After all, we can identify effortlessly — regardless of their genders — a collection of our children (and grandchildren etc.), siblings, parents (and grandparents), cousins (the singular of which is curiously gender-neutral), and even our in-laws. But when my mother’s sister and her husband pay a visit, we have to identify each separately, rather than use a deft “unt” or “ancle” to capture the pair. Woe to anyone who has multiple nieces and nephews — at least when trying to identify them as a group. Why is this group of relatives with whom we’re connected through our parents so descriptively under-served?