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Em dashes are amazing

psychotechnology.substack.com

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Re: Em dashes are amazing

#111

Post by [deleted] »

treetalker wrote: post #97
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…

Fun fact! Where a compound term is formed by joining two nouns of equal importance — such as Sarbanes–Oxley or attorney–client privilege — an en-dash, not a hyphen, should be used.

[deleted]

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#112

Post by moregrist »

adverbly wrote: post #93
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

That is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.

This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.

It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:

> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.

[0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#114

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

With HTML, I can do everything as a and the eyeball reader doesn't know/care. Where it matters is that I'm stripping semantic meaning, which hurts computers and possible accessibility devices.

Most of my life, the same has been true about dashes. I use - for every one of the kinds you provided because - lives on my keyboard.

Is there real value in caring? Does it have the same semantic—stripping effect for computers/accessibility devices? The part of me wondering if I really should care is trying to suss out if this is a real problem or just an argument for semantics pedantics.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#115

Post by readread »

thfuran wrote: post #48
pohl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first sentence is a perfect example of why emdashes need to exist. The comma is overloaded, since it can be used both as a list separator and for parenthetical asides. But that first sentence starts using them as a list separator, and then inserts a parenthetical aside into the list. Emdash wins this test.

I think parenthesis are ideal for a parenthetical aside.

I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.

I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#116

Post by coderbants »

I just use hyphens all the time and always have. I don’t like that AI loves em dashes so much that it looks like everything I write now is AI generated, but if you were to deep dive you’d notice I’m using hyphens - never em dashes - so my writing can’t be AI. Granted you’d have to be pretty pedantic to care in the first place but it’s 2026 and here we are.

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#117

Post by macintux »

EGreg wrote: post #108
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…

In many countries around the world, em dashes also express dialogue! I grew up reading novels and plays Inspector Lestrade and Holmes were speaking: — What’s up? — Not much — Cool.

em dashes are also sometimes used to express interruption in dialog.

"I was thinking—"

"Well, there's your first mistake"

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#118

Post by al_be_back »

Em dashes are indeed amazing! Go U+2014 !

has anyone used/seen em dashes in file/dir names? just wondered — I have't.

It's certainly easier to read than a hyphen/minus...but i guess it may become problematic cross-platform (on windows/linux it isn't as straight forward as on macos).

Re: Em dashes are amazing

#120

Post by DonHopkins »

eddyg wrote: post #109
adverbly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is so stupid. Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large). Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power. The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52 I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.

I do miss the old PHP manuals on Hurricaine Electric with the comment sections where anyone could discuss every function, ask stupid questions, and post totally bogus answers, which everyone would then believe without skepticism, then copy and paste into their code in production.

It was like pre-AI poor man's artisnal LLM hallucinations.

There need to be chat discussions like that for every unicode character.

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