- Kierkegaard found an application for the three-em dash here: “I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away ⸻ yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ⸻ and wanted to shoot myself.”
- I think this is cool and am happy to see the post to learn more about punctuation. LLMs have really brought the en/em (and beyond because there are so many) dash into the spotlight in a negative way. At a previous dev job I handled copy being sent for translation and got feedback from writers about inputting strings with the incorrect dash.
This is industry-standard punctuation with real use cases, obviously there's a saturation point but that is more LLM induced than anything else.
From a coding standpoint I'm surprised devs are not more interested in punctuation like this because there are so many different operators and syntax across programming languages.
- I'm going to make a super-slop model ⸻ train it on text that gpt-4o-mini improved five times ⸻ and this is going to be the dash that it uses.
- Wait till you see Asterism and “Cyrillic Letter Multiocular O”
- A link for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_O_variants#Multiocula...
- whythough.jpg
- "It is (and, increasingly, was) used to signify that a bibliography entry has the exact same author(s), editor(s), translator(s), or corporate author(s) as the previous bibliography entry."
- Sloppy: "–"
Sloppier "—"
Sloppiest ⸻
