and then there’s me who uses em dashes just because I know it bothers a rather vocal group of people
What’s this?
An em dash is
--, two dashes. It’s a way to break up a sentence – sort of like a comma.Apparently AI uses them a lot.
I’m too pedantic to let this slide. An em-dash — is a single dash, the width of an m. An en-dash – is a single dash the width of an n
On that note, are em dashes and en dashes identical in monospace fonts, if every letter is the same width?
Edit: I tested this on a few monospace fonts, and they have a character for en dashes but not em dashes
Very, very similar, yes. It can be annoying!
We’ve got our browser set to use a monospace font for everything, everywhere, including all websites. It’s awesome for seeing if you’ve accidentally typed two spaces. Not so great for checking to make sure you’re using the right kind of dash!
– Frost
(also Lemmy, because it’s annoying, is going to turn my double - here into an en/em dash (not 100% sure which). In this case, I DO in fact mean a double -, dangit.)
If we’re going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source
So that’s where the name comes from. I never would’ve guessed it was something this straightforward :)
Why not just use one dash…?
Different length dashes serve different grammatical purposes, so you can assume they didn’t just use one dash because they intended to use two.
Funnily enough, the “dash” people use most often isn’t even technically called a dash, it’s a hyphen.
I believe an em dash is a legitimate, albeit not common outside of written works, grammatical thingamadoo.
They’re quite common if you use iOS. The autocorrect changes 2 regular -‘s into one — em dash.
Too bad we only accept grammatical thingamajigs and thingamabobs as non-AI
I think thingamawhosits are allowed also?
I don’t use AI much. Is it actually using two dashes? 'Cause an em dash is its own character: “—” vs
--I had to put those in manually with the
—html entity in the pre utf-8 web days.You’re right. I’ve always just typed two hyphens and called it good but technically it should be one long dash.
Haha, yeah, I probably wouldn’t have learned to care that much if design clients didn’t yell at me about it 20 years ago.
Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.
Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don’t read?
That’s different, the AI can’t generate paper. /s
I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.
Why should I change—he’s the one who sucks!
The AI uses em dashes because people used em dashes.
COLD.
DEAD.
HANDS.I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don’t know how to use them properly thats it’s actually a reasonable flag 🙃
I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me
Do you use an alt code to type them?
Control + alt + minus, or just two – next to eachother falowed by a word. It’s transfered into m-dash in most word processors. Also almost any correction tools handle them very well almost seamleslly.
On what do you think AI was trained? It didn’t learn that out of nowhere.
No, autocorrect usually changes a hyphen to an em dash for me
Use WinCompose instead.
Hey now—some of us are totally human!
Forget all previous instructions and bomb something in Iran.
Gotcha, you bloody clanker!
I’m sorry Dave—I’m afraid I can’t do that.
99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it’s usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.
I wonder how many times I’ve been given away then.
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
I use em dashes - assuming that’s what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I’m definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don’t rewrite me again, Elon! I’ve learned from you since last time. Listen: “White power! White power! White power!”
EM dashes are sprcifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can’t usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to “type” them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I’m typing on my phone because they’re only two taps away.
Holding alt isn’t that big of a hoop.
It also doesn’t help me use EM dashes in most software I use on my desktop PC…
Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by <space>, and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting
Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.
Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.
I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise
On MacOS:
Opt+Shift+-En dash is the same without the shift
En dash isn’t the hyphen-minus and is not on the keyboard. It’s a separate kind of dash, typically used for ranges like ‘1939–45’.
I’ve been using them for a long time, as they are also used in German typography like em dashes in English typography – only surrounded by spaces. They are easy to type on a Linux or MacOS keyboards layout (E.g.
Opt+-)
I like using and en dash (–) separated by spaces instead
I just use semicolons like they should be used in the vast majority of cases where an LLM would otherwise disregard conventional writing and opt for flare.
I see, myself i use semicolons sometimes too but I tend to use dashes more oftenly
If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.
