Hyphen-hype
The weaponisation of a commonly used mark of punctuation, and how best to counter it
The minister of Punctuation, Propaganda, and Fake News was addressing his aides and assorted flunkies. There is good news and there is bad news, said the minister. First, the good news. The good news is that our Operation Hyphen worked even better than we anticipated.
The terror attack we masterminded triggered an inevitable response from The Adversary who promptly launched multiple strikes against the terrorist training camps we've established.
So far so good, said the minister, while his aides and assorted flunkies nodded in obsequious agreement.
With the escalation of hostilities which we so cunningly had provoked, international attention, not to mention alarm, got focused on the face-off between us and the adversary, as we had planned, said the minister.
This was the good news, he continued. Our Operation Hyphen was crowned with success because in the eyes of the international community we and the adversary got re-hyphenated.
Or, to be more precise, clarified the minister, we and the adversary got re-re-hyphenated, after having been repeatedly de-de-hyphenated.
The hyphen, explained the minister, which is not to be confused with the N dash or the M dash, or the minus sign which it resembles, is one heck of a juju of a punctuation mark. Its name derives from the Greek 'Huphen', which in late Latin became 'hyphen' and means 'together'.
The first recorded use of the hyphen to join two words, and by implication, give them equal value or status was by Dionysus Thrax, the great Greek grammarian (170-90BC), pronounced the minister.
Thanks to the hyphen we got equated with The Adversary, even though we are a bankrupt military dictatorship and The Adversary is the world's most populous democracy and the fifth-largest economy to boot, he gloated.
That's good news, he said. Unfortunately, he continued, the bad news is that The Adversary has made it abundantly clear to all concerned that to counter our hyphen, if necessary it is ready to come up with an even bigger juju of a punctuation mark: the Full Stop…
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