[Gail White]

This is it. Tonight the gobble-uns 'll getcha.

http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/litt...ant_annie.html

Boo!

[Michael F]

Ann --

I have never understood the name em dash for this, the most versatile of punctuation marks.

I’ll adopt your old supposition -- if you don’t mind.

[Ann Drysdale]

Michael, in the days of hot metal (as distinct from heavy metal) the compositor had a choice of dashes - a hyphen, which is the baby, an en dash (the width of a letter n in the typeface being used) which is its big brother, or an em-dash, the daddy of them all. I think that "our" Em's dashes are even bigger, so perhaps we are right, so long as we continue to use the upper-case E when we refer to them.

I was never really a compositor; I just had to join their Union (NATSOPA) because Mirror Newspapers was a closed shop and I couldn't join the journalists' Union (NUJ) because a newspaper (The News Chronicle) had just been closed and no journalists were to be employed until those who had lost their jobs as a result of the closure had been re-employed in the industry. So I was taken on as a compositor and got transferred. In the old days the rules were strict, their reasons transparent and fair, but there were always ways...

[Ann Drysdale]

Gail, I lit a candle last night against the gobble-uns and it was still burning bright to welcome Samhain, which slipped in at midnight and enwintered them all.

Nevertheless, I couldn't resist counting my toes before I thrust them into my slippers and carried out the morning rituals of dog-and-kettle.

[Brian Allgar]

Ann, when I was at school, there were various 'practical' classes such as art, woodwork, and printing - which I loved. It was a proper (i.e. mechanical) printing press, and we had to ink up the roller, turn the wheel to print a page and, of course, compose the text using sticks, as a result of which I learnt to read upside-down and back to front. One of these days, I hope to learn to read in the usual way.