A grammar lesson for area baseball fans

Winston-Salem's minor league baseball team announced its new name/mascot today. The team formerly known as the Warthogs (and the Spirits before that) will now be......The Dash. (One of my co-workers just asked me, "As in 'Mrs.'?")

Personally, I was always partial to the Spirits - not just because that was what they were called when I was a kid and I don't like change - because I just liked the carefree, soaring sound of it. But my college's mascot is also the Spirits, and I can tell you from experience that it's extremely difficult to represent graphically. Most abstract team names - the Browns, the Cardinal, etc. - either ditch the mascot or go with something else altogether - like the Carolina Tarheels, whose mascot is a giant psychotic-looking bovine.

And I hated "The Warthogs." I'm a firm believer that a team name should be unique to the area where it plays. Generic is bad, and the only thing connecting "Warthogs" to "Winston-Salem" was a bit of bush-league alliteration. This is why the "Jazz" belong in New Orleans, the "Ravens" in Baltimore, the "Hornets" in Charlotte and the "Packers" and "Steelers" in Wisconsin and Pittsburgh, respectively. Isn't a sports team supposed to represent local pride? How can it do that when its name sounds like it came out of a Random Nasty Animal Name Generator?

Which brings me to "The Dash." Again, I have no problem with abstract team names, but they can be awkward until people get used to them (like the Tarheels and their not-at-all-native-to-NC mascot with which NO ONE but me seems to have an issue...). Whoever came up with "The Dash" probably thought he/she was doing exactly what I mentioned above - choosing a team name inexorably tied to Winston-Salem. Here's my problem: that thing between "Winston" and "Salem" IS NOT A DASH. It is A FRACKING HYPHEN.

And yes, I'm upset about this. I'm a writer; it's part of my job to get pissy when people screw with the English language. Especially peeve-inducing is the fact that the dash and hyphen are two of my favorite punctuation marks. (Yes, I have favorite punctuation marks. Shut up.) Hyphens connect words that belong together only temporarily, finding a clear linguistic intent in random strings of words - "a good looking man" and a "good-looking man" are two different things (unless of course the hot guy also has really good vision). A dash is a semi-colon with an attitude - I love dashes so much that part of my editing process is making sure I take half of them out. (See how I just did that? Aaaaah, it makes me happier than Ben & Jerry's.)

So I'm officially reserving judgment on "The Dash." As long as people don't start referring to hyphens as dashes and citing the local baseball team as evidence, I'll stay neutral.