omtai:

just learned people associate em dashes with chat gpt. Girl fuck you. You can pry em dashes from my cold dead hands. One of us is gonna have to stop using em— and it’s not gonna be me!

Dammit. Emily Dickinson did not die for our sins to be insulted like that

They better not be appropriating my double dashes too

…Though the only reason I use a double dash followed by a space when writing anything online– instead of the properly style-manual-approved em dash with no spaces—is that I spent my young adulthood on yahoogroups and email lists

where any character beyond the most basic letters and numbers and shift-number punctuation would run a risk of getting turned into something wholly different and unacceptable on the recipient’s end

em-dashes tended to turn into something indistinguishable from a hyphen… and if there was no space after it, both sides would be considered part of the same longass word and would end up carried onto the next line, leaving a huge jarring gap where the word followed by the dash was supposed to be

in conclusion: writers on the Internet who like to use long dashes have been in a war against internet technology since at least 1999 and probably much earlier. This is just the latest battle. We will fucking win