Post #1939124
2026-04-26 15:52 UTC
Replies (6)
-
@bytebro@mastodonapp.uk 2026-04-26 15:59
@wdlindsy Great little thread, and I had no idea that little annoying character had such a long history!
-
@bituur_esztreym@pouet.chapril.org 2026-04-26 16:27
@wdlindsy i'm with you here — too. known also as "cadratin" — from the italian "quadrato" attested since 1583 as typographic term — it was there since Plantin & the first printing powerhouses — at a time when San Francisco didn't exist — and the valley was some ignored coomb in Ohlone territory!
-
@orionkidder@writing.exchange 2026-04-26 17:27
@wdlindsy Quite right. LLMs use them *because* they're all over the sample texts. In fact, before LLMs, I personally thought dashes were replacing all punctuation, slowly but surely. The issue isn't dashes, or the word "delve," or even the [shudder] "not just... but also..." structure. The issue is that LLMs are word-probability machines, so they use dashes and "delve" and all of that... blandly. LLMs by definition use them in the most average fashion. They're the prose equivalent of beige.
-
@ruari@velocipederider.com 2026-04-26 19:32
@wdlindsy I used emdash extensively in the past but these days I find myself avoiding it just so that people don't assume I use AI all the time. Another character I use often is ellipses (…), I'm dreading the day that AI decides to start using this and I have to drop that as well.
-
@Enema_Cowboy@dotnet.social 2026-04-27 12:07
@wdlindsy That threw me when I started reading Ulysses.
-
@EricLawton@kolektiva.social 2026-04-27 18:17
@wdlindsy No time for this rn—gotta dash—brb. @blogdiva