this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Okay I hate that this is how I am all the time now, but was this written by AI?
This was published on February 14, 2022, before ChatGPT's public release in November 2022. Inverse was also a real journalist publication that slowly got enshittified, but was still good in 2022.
I remember reading this article when it was first published, in 2022, for whatever that's worth.
I can guarantee you it was not. Some people just refuse to give up their dashes. :)
It's not just the em dashes, but the phasing as well. Happy to be proven wrong though.
No way a language model would come up with the victim mrs joke. And in general the writing of the whole piece is profoundly human, it's just clear that a lot of care went into it.
Like me — I love these things!! 😍 (I never use them properly though—iirc there is supposed to be no space between them and the letters like that, and also they should appear in pairs, but I dare to be different!)
There are no strict universal rules about the spacing, just be consistent for pete's sake!
The em dash is a perfectly cromulent piece of punctuation that is slightly more serious in tone than putting an aside in parentheses and therefore is irreplaceable.
Yup. Personally I prefer the em-dash—glorious at it is—without spaces surrounding it, whereas the en-dash – a lowlier punctuation – is best presented with spaces. In consequence I find em-dashes look better when presented with proper typography rather than in random places on the internet. But that's just personal preference. I'm tired of either character being treated as suspicious.
I don't think the en-dash should be used for parenthetical remarks. It's primary use, in any case, is to represent ranges, like 3−4.