Post #1810409
2026-04-26 15:50 UTC
"The em-dash was not invented last November in a Silicon Valley server farm. It has been a staple of English prose since roughly the seventeenth century, and a darling of the literary canon for nearly as long. Laurence Sterne built Tristram Shandy on it. Lord Byron reached for it to grieve."
~ Chitown Kev
#EmDash #SiliconValley #AI #language #writing #literature
/1
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/4/26/800028011/community/abbreviated-pundit-roundup/
Replies (2)
-
@wdlindsy@toad.social 2026-04-26 15:51
"Emily Dickinson so thoroughly owned the mark that biographers now speak of the 'Dickinson dash' — her first editors, in 1890, quietly deleted most of them to make her seem more ladylike, an act of vandalism successive generations of scholars have spent a century undoing. Virginia Woolf used the em-dash to splice consciousness." #EmDash #SiliconValley #AI #language #writing #literature /2
-
@amfernee@gardenstate.club 2026-04-26 19:29
@wdlindsy I started writing em dashes when I applied for my MS degree in 2018 (that was a common piece of advice at the time), and now I'm "afraid" to use them