There's far more niche things in unicode, and I don't really see that much point getting angry over them.
I'm sorry but someone has to stand up for simplicity and to stop garbage from making its way into open public standards. The bar has to be set somewhere. How many people actually use this thing? We can't go introducing characters into standards just because six people with power want some claim to fame. I for one wasn't even aware that Unicode characters could be so large. Did they have to make a special exception fo…
I don't think they're adding these things for fame, I gotta say. And yeah, unicode characters can be pretty large. Again, this is isn't even the tip of the iceberg of unicode complexity or weirdness.
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…
Sounds like you'll appreciate my favorite related bit of typographic dash pedantry, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-... If you want to be official about things, use the en dash to replace a hyphen in compound adjectives when at least one of the elements is a two-word compound. the pre–Websterburg Bakery era The thinking is that using a hyphen here, as in “the pre-Websterburg Bakery er…
> I don't know how to code an endash here.
Just type it like normal – alt-hyphen on Macs, and I'm sure equivalent on other systems.
One of the more memorable and influential library finds for me was an article in _Advertising Age_ which enumerated all of the special characters which should be set so as to accurately communicate, so in addition to en and em dashes it noted: - − (minus symbol) for use in math equations or to indicate a negative - I believe it also noted that there were two forms for the hyphen, normal and discretionary - × (multipl…
> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. That's not what I said or what I intended to imply. I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected. The line has to be drawn somewhere t…
>I would assume almost nobody encounters That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.
That analogy is not accurate.
To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.
Regarding the AI-perspective of the emdash being commiserated here... As a few have pointed out, many writers have been using it usefully since long before the blight. The current state of revolt is probably a phase though, as models will learn to account and adjust for the litany of literary crimes they've been committing. In some ways we are fortunate to have such easy signals to work with while, already, false pos…
Thank you, this is the deepest comment in the thread (and lol at all the self-demonstrating sentences). I'm annoyed that so many people limit their analysis to shallow things like em dashes and "delve," and don't seem to have the critical thinking necessary to analyze textual construction, let alone actual meaning. Instead it's all cutesy remarks about how Emily Dickinson must have been an AI.
Most of my analysis is very unpopular and focused on what I believe will soon be the primary purpose of these systems. I called 2025 the golden age of AI, and though it extended well into 2026, I fear it's coming to an end, making way for something very different. Around here, they're (llms) mostly viewed through a lens of code acuity. I think the epistemological, linguistic, manipulative and psychological aspects will be much bigger topics soon. We've truly cracked Pandora's box, and regulation may skew perspective, but won't be putting the lid back on. Strange shit happens when you consolidate all human knowledge into 4 frontier models controlled by a small group of people, all of which are now deeply involved with the Pentagon. And the only substantial competition is Chinese... I don't think "interesting times" was ever intended to suggest this degree of intensity. Yep, I'm an alarmist when not leaving funny comments. I think I'll go listen to some Yampolskiy now.
I think offsetting the em dash with spaces is contrary to almost every style guide.
I think this is a localisation issue; in the UK, it's much more common to see space-surrounded em dashes.
As far as I know, the UK styles that recommend spaced dashes are using en dashes where US English would use em dashes, and the ones that actually use em dashes, like Cambridge or Oxford, are unspaced.