Compose + --- produces —
See all other combos in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
But who is using it without it in common scenarios?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
Smart tools like LibreOffice and above indeed help with it, but in other scenarios, especially common browser usage that's not the case. Compose key is really useful for that, but it's not widely known outside of Linux.
A few of the easier to remember:
option + 0 for degrees º
option + u for to place an umlaut over the next typed character (when it's a valid combination, anyway) ëüä
option + c for cedilla ç
Also if you need ad-hoc bullets, just reach for option + 8.
• Like this.
The difficulty in accessing symbols like these is one of my (I'm sure correctable) hang-ups when using Linux — Arch, btw.
By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.
The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.
They are more prevalent in nonfiction.
Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.
This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.
Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.
The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.
So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.
Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.
I picked up the habit a couple years ago of just undoing the autocorrect to an em dash and leaving it as two dashes to avoid accusations -- now it’s stuck with me
— drob518
When I was growing up, I saw plays also use it like this:
The two are in a room.
-- Some guy says this
-- The other guy says that
I believe I've also seen it in Spanish and Portuguese.
Related and perhaps interesting: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114730157688607856
Now everyone asks me what AI I’m using
It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.
A punctuation mark was “cringe”? Seriously? Is this middle school?
tldr: use spaces around em dashes
Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)
I grew up among European and other international English speakers and writers, and no one blinks an eye at a semicolon or an em-dash. I'm not saying they use them frequently or overuse them, they simply know how to use them correctly and use them well. Writing without either is like ... cooking without garlic. You can, but it certainly makes affairs a lot more boring.
Now I understand that America has gone through 1-2 generations of English language teachers drilling their students to simplify, simplify, simplify and emulate the ideal of Hemingway. Is that where this all comes from, do you think?
No. It comes from the fact that Americans are functionally illiterate and genuinely have no idea how to use or interpret em dashes or semicolons. They don't use them and don't expect anyone else to use them. The only time Americans see these punctuations are in the handful of classic books they're required to skim to pass high school English class.
Let the em-dash remain upon the height of style. Let the hyphen toil in the shade of the valley. And let the en-dash—patient, capable, and unjustly overlooked—at last be admitted to polite society, where it may properly mediate matters of form–function.
kayo_20211030•1h ago
kayo_20211030•1h ago
BeetleB•1h ago
Restored.