Of assholes and em-dashes

Image via Business News Daily.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Cop Mind", New York Times, December 9 2014:

I spent literally months in 1983 as a police reporter, between college and starting on my internship with old Mr. Buckley, so you can trust me, I know cops.

But what he knows is not in any way different from anything else you can read from any cop-sympathetic source or for that matter from watching cop-fiction series on television, and it's neither right enough to be interesting nor wrong enough to be worth arguing with.

The only slightly interesting thing about today's column is mainly of interest to copy editors: not the revelation that Brooks knows the word "asshole" but the way the fit-for-the-Times version is styled, where he's discussing the hardbitten and cynical culture that sometimes grows out of policemen's suffering:

In many places, a self-supporting and insular police culture develops: In this culture no one understands police work except fellow officers; the training in the academy is useless; to do the job you’ve got to bend the rules and understand the law of the jungle; the world is divided into two sorts of people — cops and a — holes.

If you want to use the word "asshole" without typing it, there is a well-established conventional method, the replacement of letters by asterisks or hyphens (a**hole, a--hole) or perhaps the chaste ellipsis used in old typography to suggest that a fictional name is actually a real one in a mask:

In M..., einer bedeutenden Stadt im oberen Italien, ließ die verwitwete Marquise von O..., eine Dame von vortrefflichem Ruf, und Mutter von mehreren wohlerzogenen Kindern, durch die Zeitungen bekannt machen: daß sie, ohne ihr Wissen, in andre Umstände gekommen sei...

or closed-up quotation dash of the 18th century,

(I believe I've seen underscore used the same way, a__hole, but can't find an authority.) (By the way, I also object to Brooks's cap after the colon, and the unmotivated series of semicolons where commas would do. The Tom Jones bit here shows how to use a semicolon to separate clauses that are full of commas, including an Oxford comma that I had no idea went back to 1749—turns out it's found in some 17th-century texts.)

The use of the standard Times em-dash surrounded by spaces, however, especially two words away from an em-dash in a normal use, makes you read it as a kind of e.e. cummings strange parenthesis

two sorts of people (cops and a) holes.

It has to be some of the worst typography I've ever seen, and raises an old question that Gail Collins Andrew Rosenthal needs to answer: if editing David Brooks is such a hardship duty that you can't get anybody to do it, have you thought of offering to pay them extra?