Post #1939123
2026-04-26 15:51 UTC
"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
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Replies (2)
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@wdlindsy@toad.social 2026-04-26 15:52
"James Joyce preferred it to quotation marks, which he sneered at as 'perverted commas.' Nabokov — maestro of almost every punctuation mark — deployed it like a jazz musician. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Plath, Zadie Smith: all on its side.” I'm with Kev here — I'm with him in everything he says here. #EmDash #SiliconValley #AI #language #writing #literature /3
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@zillion@freeradical.zone 2026-04-27 18:09
@wdlindsy From now on, I'll never use an em dash again—Dickinson dashes ftw!