— and much nicer than using parentheses (). And —to go the full mile —why not use an en dash when you’re separating your page numbers 1–5 or months May–Sep next time?

Most writing tools and OSes have tricks to do these automatically for you.

Know your dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash

A word that can be its own opposite. I learned this from Kathryn Schulz’ excellent article, What part of “No, totally” don’t you understand, about how “no, totally” came to mean “yes.” Contranyms — like heteronyms, portemanteaus, palindromes, and semordnilaps — are neat things to look out for. Like how you can dust something to pick up dust from a surface, and dust that surface to remove dust from it. So versatile. Or perhaps confusing.

Contranym

The bloody mary (vodka), ruddy mary (gin), virgin mary (alcohol-free) and the bull shot (beef broth instead of tomato). Has the added advantage of almost seeming like it’s something healthy to get. I always seem to end up ordering them on flights. Happy days.

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Bloody marys