The suspended en dash, an editorial curio

Among a copy editor’s typographic tools is the useful trick known variously as the suspended hyphen, suspensive hyphen, dangling hyphen, hanging hyphen, and floating hyphen. It’s the first hyphen in phrases like sales- and service-related queries and sisters- and brothers-in-law. It helps ensure they’re not misread.

The suspended hyphen is not always deployed, and it’s seldom seen in casual writing, but it’s a moderately common device in edited prose. But I’ll wager you’ve rarely or never seen its extended cousin: the suspended en dash. Behold!

This is from Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist: And Other Essays (Faber and Faber, 2005). Here’s the text of interest:

… requiring Talking Heads– or Elvis Costello–style ironies …

We’ll leave Talking Heads aside for now. They can chat among themselves. The en dash in Elvis Costello–style ironies is an editorial nicety often skipped. My guess is that most readers wouldn’t notice if it was a hyphen or a space instead, and some will be nonplussed by the dash if they notice it at all. So I’ll explain.

The prescriptivism is coming from inside the house

Still playing catch-up on Michael Connelly’s books, I recently read his novel The Drop, which features his usual protagonist, LA-based police detective Harry Bosch. Bosch is at home watching a security tape (well, a DVD), on his teenage daughter’s laptop. She asks him what it’s about. Bosch says to her:

‘This guy checking in, he goes up to his room on the seventh floor last night and this morning he’s found on the sidewalk below. I have to figure out if he jumped or if he got dropped.’

She stopped the playback.

‘If he was dropped, Dad. Please. You sound like a palooka when you talk like that.’

‘Sorry. How do you know what a “palooka” is, anyway?’

‘Tennessee Williams. I read. A palooka is an old fighter who’s like a lout. You don’t want to be like that.’

It’s not the first time Madeline has corrected her father. In ‘Harry Bosch, trainee prescriptivist’ I reported how (in Connelly’s The Reversal) she upbraided him for using nonstandard grammar: a dialect usage of the form I’m done my work. Me, I’d rather be a palooka than a peever, but Madeline is young; she’ll come round yet.

Connelly’s books are usually well edited, but The Drop has a few questionable items worth a look – not to find fault, but out of editorial and readerly interest. First: