I love the em dash. I love semicolons, too. I love all the dark and dusty corners of the language, all the grammatical doodads, the quirks and inconsistencies. The way you can noun verbs and verb nouns.
Imagine my horror when I learned that some people see an em dash and immediately attribute it to ChatGPT.
The em dash is so functional. It can take a semicolon’s place, or a comma’s. It can be used for parentheticals, or just to help a thought take a sharp left turn. These things happen a lot around here; you can probably find an em dash in every single one of my blog posts (although I won’t go fact-check this).
I can’t just swap out the em dash for an en dash and call it good. The en dash is for sequences, to connect numbers or dates or other notations. Maybe people won’t notice. But I would.
Before I even knew what the em dash was called I used it in the form of two hyphens: --. I suppose I could do that again, if I wanted to really make it clear that this text is the result of human cogitation and not, instead, the regurgitation by a billion-parameter prediction machine.
But here’s the problem: hyphens are connective tissue. They infer direct relationship, either by connection words or separating parts of words (“pre-Industrial” or “st-st-stutter”). Sticking two together to imitate an em dash is what you do when you’re lazy, writing a plain text doc, or don’t know how to get an em dash to appear. None of which is going on here.
Why should I settle for something not-quite-right when the right thing is sitting right in front of me? No, the em dash is here in this blog to stay.
Nothing in this blog is or ever will be generated by anything other than my own mind and fingers. And every em dash is lovingly placed.