Sentence:  Imagine a parliamentary stenographer scribbling furiously in the days before tape recorders. His job is to record politicians' speeches so they can be written up and preserved in an official parliamentary record like <WSD>Hansard</WSD>. [...] When some dramatic break or swerve in the speech seems too uncertain to sort out there and then, the stenographer sticks in clumps of hyphens, partly as a signal to himself that he will need to sort this out later when "correcting" and "clarifying" his final copy for <WSD>Hansard</WSD>. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  The official report of debates and other proceedings in the British and some Commonwealth parliaments.