– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Konnichiwaー

That's a hyphen, and (to be pedantic) style guides usually do not consider it a dash.

There's also the 2-em dash in some style guides for redacting words, and since care needs to be taken to avoid a line wrap between the em dashes, Unicode has a character for it: ⸺

Finally,

> - em dash: adjoining thought (Hey, so — <declaration>)

This use is sometimes discouraged by style guides, and in many cases, it can be replaced with a colon, comma, or semicolon.

In general, even before AI, the em dash is often considered overused.[0] My guess is that the em dash is perceived as sounding educated, so novice writers who learn about it end up using it recklessly, and LLMs could've picked up this habit from them.

[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/05/em-dashes-why-write...

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.

//! This is mission critical, don't remove...

That said I've only been on Linux for 25 years so I still haven't figured out how to actually get em dashes and have to resort to the double minus like up there.

More importantly though, the em-dash-in-a-sentence construct is a way of thinking and the notation is of lesser importance than the way to express oneself. I dont think the current distrust is from the symbol: the LLMs love em dashes for the same reasons many of us do, and, perhaps better than most of us, they have no trouble using the correct symbol.

And it really couldn't have been anything other than the em-dash because I've been deleting the account's comments when they were about a week old so there were no previous comments to draw any conclusions from.

I don't care though, I've been using em-dashes since the late '90s making me partly responsible (along with all the other em-dashers) for LLMs being so fond of them, so I'm not going to stop just because of them.

You could write naturally and then let an LLM translate avoiding the 1000 words, with verification harness or maybe a custom sampler.

But seriously, trying to express the spider web of thoughts in my head as a linear string of words is really difficult for me and that doesn't make me feel very smart.

Profanity for the sake of profanity is lame and immature.

I have always loved—and used—the em-dash [...] ;)

huh?

Oh - you meant iOS. I don't see a need to differentiate dashes there either...

I'm curious why? Kerning? Regardless, it sounds like a lot of work

> but really should find a copy of the actual magazine....

Uh, "..." ;)

> He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ⸻, under a plain marble slab

If we were to use three em dashes in a row, the renderer typically puts a 1-2px gap between them. Using U+2E3B leaves no gaps.

Likewise, we use a 2-em dash, U+2E3A, for partially obscured words, for example this line from Gogol's short fiction:

> The town of B⸺ had become very lively since a cavalry regiment had taken up its quarters in it.

https://danieljtortora.com/blog/3-em-dashes

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!

"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."

(Unrelated: The alt-code for em-dash on Windows is Alt+0151. I just typed my first manual em-dash wow exciting.)

> And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.

> And also occasionally (occasionally) one just needs a random dramatic pause.

I know which one I'd rather read. Though, frankly, I'd prefer neither and I'm trying to remove this kind of thing from my own writing.

The New York Times Manual of Style, for instance, only permits using an en dash as a minus sign. Joining nouns like Sarbanes-Oxley and even number ranges use hyphens instead.

The BBC News Style Guide and the Economist Style Guide similarly use hyphens in place of en dashes - though sometimes BBC seems to use en dashes in place of em dashes.

The University of Cambridge Style Guide simply says to avoid dashes altogether.

The AMA Manual of Style explicitly declares that one should hyphenate two or more nouns of equal importance. They however continue to use the en dash when the first word in the compound modifies more than one word (e.g. anti–Norwalk virus).

The Chicago Manual of Style nearly got rid of the en dash as well, but backtracked after backlash.

Ceasing the happy tradition of using the hyphen between equal-weighted nouns because of a hacker news comment is the moral equivalent of adopting expletives from the kids menu at a diner.

But I see you using an em-dash to hyphenate "semantic-stripping" as a joke, which is funny. Is that real value? Is conveying to others that you're educated real value?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox–Zucker_machine

While there's no central authority, both Oxford and Cambridge University press style guidelines recommend that.

[1]: I'd even go so far as to extend that "anyone" to: "anyone creating, even with AI assistance!"

As a reader, I dislike seeing em dashes almost everywhere.

It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.

About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.

oh no!

my favourite (and I hope LLMs never converge to use it)

> The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen

I think this is the real reason for its (pre-LLM) ubiquity - it's a really flexible, versatile bit of punctuation, whereas most of its siblings have a more specific meaning or purpose.

My apologies, should I have typed \thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.\thinspace.?

That's what I'd do. Note the conversion of the first comma to "and," as well.

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.

Triple emdash cannot be used as a lubricant. Do not touch, inhale, or look at triple emdash. Do not taunt triple emdash.

In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

However, when encoding them into Unicode, the consortium suddenly discovered the importance of being frugal with character IDs and only defined a single "Han" sequence of characters for all three scripts. You need to select a matching font to actually display the text in the script that's intended.

This makes using those characters an unnecessary hassle and also came over as a cultural faux-pas to some (essentially like encoding Greek Eta, Latin H and Cyrillic En as the same character, because they look similar and the scripts have a common history)

<s>It also looks a bit hypocritical when Unicode otherwise goes the opposite way and has the space to encode dozens of variants of the Latin alphabet or — as we see here — several categories of dashes.</s> (Edit: Han unification was done when Unicode was still 16 bit, so there were real space constraints — so no hypocrisy actually)

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

I checked a message from my last chat with Claude

> Noted for this conversation — though worth flagging

and that's an em-dash (unicode 0x2014)

If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash.

EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)

Counterpoint: the people who use tools the most should be the ones designign and creating them. All you have to do is continue not using it just like you did before it existed, but instead you insisted that its existence make sense to you as someone who doesn't need it and doesn't do what it's meant to help with.

Really, they needed to come up with the idea of variation selectors way earlier, and use them aggressively. And design something more consistent for character composition, and skip the precomposed characters (those really are glyphs representing a cluster; being able to treat the cluster as an atomic entity versus its components doesn't add actual semantic information to the text).

I definitely prefer it un-spaced, though, personally.

I've been doing doing it that way for so long I still often use the "--" construct from way back in ascii email days.

At least I've gotten past the two-spaces after a period I learned from the typewriter. Most of the time, anyway.

(Not my intent to be pedantic.)

This is not the best source (I’m pressed for time) but it gives a decent explanation: https://editorsmanual.com/articles/en-dash/#elements-of-equa...

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...

Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.

So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.

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

For the poster child of a naïvely set/composed text which suffers thereby see:

https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/vir...

That a book about a perfectly made tool cabinet suffers from so many typos (the maker's name, Henry, is mis-spelled on the inside cover) and such pedestrian composition embodies much of what went wrong when the typesetting unions all bargained for sinecures rather than active participation in the Desktop Publishing Revolution.

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.

A stream of short sentences often feels lazy, reductive, and tedious. But it is more forgiving--you can't fail if you don't try. And it inflates word count, similar to verbose Java vs compact Perl.

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

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

For the reader… I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant? When I look, I’m usually specifically looking for the single entry that corresponds to the citation on some claim in the text.

Although if someone really wanted these triple-dashes for their journal for some reason, I bet some tex could be coded up that would generate them. Could look neat, maybe.

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 for this or are there other characters that are that wide?

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 to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.

How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about.

Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?

Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation.

> Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line)

In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.

Personally, I think em-dashes (when in a font that shows the damn difference) look exaggerated and silly. They certainly don't provide any important guidance to its meaning that I can't derive from context.

That was a cool toolbox BTW :)

Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode trying to capture existing behavior, even if rare. And I think it's important to err on the side of capturing what people did, even if it's from an bygone era.

> How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

It's definitely more than 10. But even if it's 10, I disagree with your assessment. People used this; it's worth a codepoint. There are far stranger code points out there.

And I've seen far weirder things in open standards. Have you read the C99 standard? Are you aware of the three allowed integer representations? Of which maybe two were in use in 1999, and one only in use in relic hardware that might exist in maybe tens of sites.

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.

Yes, the Studley tool cabinet is amazing, which makes the infelicities of the book all the more enraging.

As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied.

> I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant?

Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite.

You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into.

The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again.

While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.