Symbolic Symbols

While we're on the subject, some of you (especially you intuitives) may be wondering why this (--) pops up on my blog.  Back to the symbolism we go.

The long hyphen, or em dash, appears as two hyphens on Blogger because the keyboard combinations don't work (or I don't know how to operate them).  In syntax, it represents a break between two related parts of a sentence.  On the other hand, the hyphen connects compound words and the en dash connects numbers.  Here's a nice little table for you:



The em dash connects two aspects of a thought.

I use it when I can't come up with a title.  It's a good catch-all because it's symbolic.  It represents the theme of this blog -- the connections between everything in this universe.  (See what I did there?)

I have a poetry blog, too, and there I use the semicolon (;).  This symbol serves the same purpose as the em dash -- to connect clauses of a sentence -- but its use is more expansive.  The semicolon indicates that the first clause contains only half of the sentence's meaning; that there is always more to come.

My poetry blog is about my experiences and how they are part of a grand story.  I use a period at the end of post titles to insinuate that they are finalized, fixed points in time, but throughout the poems' contents I use semicolons to hint that this is not the end -- that each experience is still only part of the prequel.