The Dash - My Favorite Grammatical Weapon

If you tell someone that you teach English - which is somewhat akin to telling someone you work for the IRS: it should be avoided until it can't be - there are a handful of common reactions. One of boredom - they simply don't care anymore than I care that the person I'm talking to sells insurance. This is probably the best outcome.

The outcome you don't want is for the person to immediately assume that the way they (I know) talk is going to come under scrutiny - not what they say, but how they say it. This always strikes me as insane, probably because I came to English late in my academic career and then only from a very particular vantage point: I was interesting in the philosophy of language, particularly how words and gestures are used to make sense of and change the world. In my own writing, I make grammatical mistakes all the time. In fact, it's to such a point that I've stopped worrying about, or hell, believing in Standard Written English. The only time I write in that dead language is when I have to write academic essays in college - essays that are so structurally lame that no matter how interesting the content may be I'm always surprised if anybody could really make it to page 20 without some serious browsing and skimming along the way.

So, I've learned to use grammar in ways that reflect the way that I take the world in- a grammar that reflects my style, my way of going. And the device that I find most useful is the dash - that wonderful line that allows me to both be tangential and relevant - not a stop, exactly; rather a continuation that is moving like a jazz piece - it's related to the theme, but it's also an extension. The dash is about speed.

In my mind, this is the way grammar should work. It wasn't handed down by the gods - it's a device that is supposed to help us be understood. And in writing, the speaker is not there to respond, to make sure that the point is taken the way it's intended. Because of this, grammatical quirks can be both functionally useful and a cool way to piss off snooty academic types who are very proud that they have Fowler's book of Use and Abuse constantly within arms link - as though anybody gets to have the final word on communication.

(As a side note, I love how David Foster Wallace would regularly throw conjunctions together and start sentences with them, e.g, "And so there we were." That's how people I know actually talk. I even remember once he began with "And but so," which to me is simply a wonderful use of words.)