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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#81

Post by sarreph »

Telemakhos wrote: post #61
sarreph wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it. We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving ov…

The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en dash" should illustrate their age: they go back to the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width. The idea…

As per sibling comment, I think my "old school" wording is getting misconstrued here. I did mean 20th-century "old school", i.e. typewriters... Is the Late Middle Ages considered "old school"? :)

Agreed that in terms of precedent, typesetters had moveable type dashes for their presses.

> the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.

This is very interesting!

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#82

Post by mahoho »

Since before LLMs were a thing I've thought em dashes (at least outside of fiction) have a kind of irritating, business-casual feel about them, since they are simultaneously informal but also fussy in a way. That also describes exactly what bothers me about the classic ChatGPT writing style, which is obsequiously friendly and casual but also perfectly organized and precise, and which I imagine is based on a large dataset of middlebrow American news blogs and similar sources. So I'm not surprised that the em dash has stuck out to people as such a prominent feature of its style. It definitely has its uses but I can't say I would mind at all if the controversy diminished its use in real writing.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#84

Post by usui »

eddyg wrote: post #80
usui wrote: post #77

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry." https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#85

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

I'm all for Unicode if you want to say something like 你好 but separate nearly similar characters, like the different kinds of dashes, feel somehow wasteful. I prefer to stick with things that align with ASCII.

Typesetting aside, the em-dash as a grammatical construct is indeed pretty great.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#86

Post by inigyou »

uberman wrote: post #36
koolala wrote: post #12

Test: 'There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum, but in the same sentence, not a new one, and, guess what, the comma is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together, and the comma lets you do exactly this. Commas make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.' I like using commas for spacing though em dashes do the sam…

I would always prefer to do: " There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum (in the same sentence, not a new one) and, guess what, parentheses are right there for you. "

The parentheses bind tightly to "an addendum" and change the meaning

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#87

Post by mc32 »

douglee650 wrote: post #72

Author failed to explain the dash universe and their semantic assignments. - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — ) - en dash: expresses a range (1–100) - dash: compounds word-parts (Sarbanes-Oxley) I'd also like to see more concise philosophy around em v. ellipsis, "limerance" is poetic (and ironically antithetical to this "essay" … and what of parens?). In short, em is communication and ellipsis is personal. I off…

Which one is the minus symbol?

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#88

Post by locknitpicker »

usui wrote: post #84
eddyg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry." https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it? I already have enough trouble distinguishing an en dash from an em dash.

> I mean... would it really be that big of a crime against humanity to insert two or three em dashes if the situation seriously needs it?

Imagine a discussion on how many em dashes should be used that mimics the discussions on story points.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#89

Post by DonHopkins »

usui wrote: post #77

You might think em dashes are amazing—but there is something three times better⸻the "three-em dash" (U+2E3B). Why this thing exists, I do not know. Unicode people seem to like making bad decisions, like Han unification and emoji sprawl.

Three-em dashes are multinational conglomerate punctuation.

They can be used as adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint-protection film, electrical insulation, car-care products, electronic circuits, optical films, Scotch tape, Post-it Notes, labels, dispensers, and magnetic tape.

In German, nouns have gender, so why not more inclusive punctuation? The him dash, her dash, it dash, and the nonbinary them dash. It would really infuriate MAGA if you could apply emoji gender and skin color.

And of course if you really want to make a statement and stick it to those anti-AI em-dash nit-pickers, there's always the Zen-like struck-out no-break space (U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE + U+0336 COMBINING LONG STROKE OVERLAY) ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ you can combine them to any length!

It's a shame Hacker News filters out the really good ones, like the üm dash: — (U+2014 EM DASH + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS) and the over-accentuated üm-á-ñå-ḍ-ç dash: — (EM DASH + DIAERESIS + ACUTE + TILDE + RING ABOVE + DOT BELOW + CEDILLA).

@dang I know @mentions don't work so you'll never read this, so screw you for filtering out my favorite glitchy punctuation diacritics, you jerk! I feel like my creativity is stifled and freedom of speech suppressed!

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#90

Post by anonthrownaway »

ryandrake wrote: post #79
anonthrownaway wrote: post #76

Funny - the ChatGPT app on mac uses a font that doesn't differentiate between any dash. I use dashes in place of commas, semicolons, colons, and brackets all the time - I just use the standard keyboard dash. Why the heck should I bother learning some stupid key combination to make the dash longer? I highly doubt that the vast majority of readers even know that there are different dashes with different uses. When I le…

Wie shood I bothr lerning two spel wen teh vass majarrity ov reedrs can stil reed dis commnt?

Wrong analogy. Why should I bother to differentiate between the length of a dash when the vast majority of readers don't have a clue what it means (and don't need it to determine meaning).
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