The Em Dash

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188 kronor per månad. Holders gräns 18 år. Stödlinjen.se. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Morris. Last summer, despite his better judgment, Brian Vance found himself in the situation that unfortunately, many of us have been in an argument with some random person on Reddit. Which is probably not the best thing to do. You know, getting into Getting into online. Fights is not a good use of anyone's time and it's definitely not good for your blood pressure.

That is frequent ninety nine PI contributor. Will Aspinall. Stump Town Savings is a website that covers local grocery deals. Every Thursday Brian releases a newsletter where he helps his readers find the best food prices in the area. He read me a little snippet. Equal Exchange Chocolate Bar Select Varieties$3.99 each. Annie's organic salad dressing select varieties two for eight. You can see this is pretty dry. Like there's not a lot that I can do to make it.

Intriguing to read. Once again, organic peanut butter select varieties,$5.99 each. Yeah, I mean I'm not under the guise that I'm gonna win like a Pulitzer Prize in literature for this. It mightn't be Faulkner, but Brian takes a lot of pride in his work, including visiting grocery stores in person to find the hottest deals for his readers. Stump Town Savings has become my full-time job. Like I spend forty hours a week

Doing this. Just trying to help people like have some say, have some power in what feels like a powerless struggle with. you know, corporate greed and inflation.

As you can tell, Brian puts a lot of effort into Stumptown savings, so he was particularly miffed when a user on Reddit accused him of the ultimate sin, using Chat GPT to compose his newsletter. Bryan didn't use AI, but it wasn't just the accusation itself that he found offensive. It was the evidence the Reddit user provided to support his allegation.

A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to my use of quote, extra long M dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard, end quote. So anyone who uses an M dash must be using AI and that's just not Okay. The reason why this Redditor believed Brian was using AI was because he chose to use an M-dash. The M-dash, if you're not familiar, is a form of punctuation that looks like a horizontal bar in a sentence.

It gets its name from its size, which is about the width of a capital M. Not to be confused with the hyphen or its persnickety cousin the N dash. M dashes are incredibly versatile because they can replace commas, colons, semicolons, and parentheses. It's an odd thing to be a fan of an M dash, but I am a fan of it. It's a fun it's a fun piece of punctuation. There's a group of people who understand it and appreciate it and really value It's flexibility.

Today there are many diehard fans of the M-Dash, but humans aren't the only ones who have taken to using the MARC. Recently, large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Have been sprinkling M'sons like digital confetti. There are some people who look at it and be like, Well, an AI must have did this, because why would a human uh use an M-dash? But That's I'm I'm a human. I can confirm I'm a human. Today we're reclaiming the M-dash for Brian and other humans.

Because this plucky bit of punctuation has had a very, very long literary history, way beyond today's tussles with technology. It's been on a hero's journey, playing the lead in an adventure story that has spanned both centuries. And the pages of our most beloved plays, novels, and poems. So, who invented it? And why?

The M-dash's origins can be found in trying to find an elegant answer to a very old problem. The problem that existed was that there wasn't really a good set of rules for punctuating text. There wasn't really any any kind of um convention that persisted for all that long or that was usable across lots of different contexts. This is Keith Houston, author of the book Shady Characters, The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks.

He says that while punctuation crept into writing systems around the third century BCE, the rules that governed them remained both complex and inconsistent well into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was around that time an Italian scholar decided to leave his mark on the world of punctuation, His name was Boncompagno de Signia. But we're mercifully gonna call him Bonnie. He practiced something called Ars Dictiminis, which was the formal art of composing letters and official documents.

The problem was that he found the then system of punctuation not up to snuff for his letter writing, so he came up with his own. And so when you had someone like um like Bonnie uh deciding to write a guide to letter writing, it was kind of up to him to decide how to punctuate things. And for whatever reason he chose this very simple system. Bonnie created two punctuation marks. One he called Virgula Sersum erecta, which looked like a forward slash.

That one indicated a pause in a sentence. The forward slash was eventually shortened and dropped to the bottom of the line, transforming it into the comma we all recognize today. It remains his greatest contribution to punctuation, and if you're fluent in Italian, which I am not, you will know that Vogola means comma, and in French It's the ghoul.

He also created a second mark called Virgula Plana, which was a horizontal dash that ended the sentence, like a period. And that is like a flat dash or a horizontal dash that looks exactly like a modern N or M dash.

But using a dash at the end of a sentence did not catch on, and for several centuries it was difficult to find consistent uses of the dash. Possibly, because the Dash was not widely adopted, its grammatical role remained slightly unclear and therefore malleable.

I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to look at the marks around it. So the full stop or period, the question mark, the comma, the colon, the semicolon and To ex to a certain extent they were all not fixed, but in slightly more common use, whereas the dash seemed to have Yeah, it slid into this new era of printing without uh necessarily a a a a big weight of opinion behind it. So perhaps it seemed more flexible.

There was freedom to experiment in its use, which is exactly what happened when it got mixed up in the theatrical milieu of sixteenth and seventeenth century Elizabethan England. No! You unnatural hags! I will have such revenge is on you both, that all the world shall I will do such things.

There's a technique in theater called aposiopisis, which is an ancient Greek term for speech that is deliberately broken off, mid-sentence. Used sparingly, it can add dramatic effect to dialogue. Sort of like This Playwrights use the dash in writing to indicate thinking pauses, interruptions, mid-speech realizations, or changes of subject for their actors. One rather famous playwright was quite fond of it.

Shakespeare's first folio is a really good example where uh people are cut off when they they lose their train of thought. It uses quite a lot of dashes. I think because it gives a bit of flexibility, it gets a bit more expressiveness. than, you know, full stops and commas and colons and so on. Are they informed of this? My breath and blood fiery, the fiery Duke, tell the hot Duke let I

Maybe he is not well. King Lear, as performed by Sir John Gielgird in 1994, a character facing the demons of old age, bad decisions, and ungrateful children. In other words, someone who might get lost in his thoughts more than most.

Using dashes to show aposteopesis has remained a staple of stagewriting, but around one hundred years after Shakespeare, in the early eighteenth century, an emerging branch of the literary arts elevated it from mere stage direction to a featured performer. Yeah, so if I guess if playwrights had used the dash to imply how a speaker was performing these words, I suppose.

For novelists. It was also used to to indicate how someone the cadence of how someone was speaking to try and bring that to life a little bit. The novel as a literary form was Well novel. It was a brand new form of writing, with stylistic conventions that broke away from classical rules of literature, Writers at the time explored authentic fictional characters with complex inner thoughts and naturalistic ways of speaking. And the M-dash was how early novelists attempted to capture that.

The dash became a really handy device to create the sense of someone almost dictating their adventures onto the page. Nowhere is this more obvious than a rambling satirical novel called Tristram Shandy, written by Lawrence Stern in seventeen fifty nine. With us, you see, the case is quite different. Dash. We are all ups and downs in this matter. Dash. You are a great genius. Dash. Or'tis fifty to one, sir, that you are a great dunce and a blockhead. Dash.

Not that there is a total want of intermediate steps. Dash. No. Dash. We're not so irregular as that comes to. Dash. But the two extremes are more common and in a greater degree in this unsettled island. This short excerpt has seven dashes in it, and it's used in every which way. In its wayward, dash strewn madness, it feels like Tristram Shandy is a fully rounded and totally flawed human being. There had been nothing like it before in English literature.

You know, someone like um uh Stern when he's writing Tristram Shandy, his he's he's jumping in and out of thought. He is he's he's trying to commit this almost stream of consciousness um narrative to paper. And it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Just the I I don't know what it is. There's something about the

The kind of the the the the verve, the kind of um the gusto behind it. It must have been like a bolt from the blue. It must have been so um incredible for people at the time to read this.

But novelists didn't stop there. Another way they used the dash to convey the illusion of reality was by using the dash to censor sensitive content. It wasn't just uh for sort of the sake of prudence, it was also to give a sense of authenticity. I think to sort of titillate readers a little bit In a world dominated by nonfiction, these early writers were using every trick in the book to be taken seriously and make their make-believe stories feel believable.

One of the ways they did this was by writing as if the fictional narrative actually took place. Novels were commonly written in the first person as if they were letters, diary entries, or memoirs, to create a sense that it was a real account.

Oftentimes names, locations, and dates were censored by dashes, sometimes to protect the identity of a real person, But more often to act as if they were protecting the identity of a real person, adding the spice of factualness to an otherwise fictional story. So you might see someone's name, you might see the first letter of their name followed by a few dashes. One writer who used the dash in this way was Jane Austen.

In Pride and Prejudice, published in eighteen thirteen, the arrival of the handsome Wickham causes a stir in the fictional town of Merriton. But Wickham is not all that he seems, and when his character is introduced, Austin uses dashes to redact the letters in the name of the army regiment he is about to join. As if that information was scrubbed from the record. Yes, she doesn't want to impugn the reputation of his um military regiment.

I think is the is is what she's trying to get across. And again, it's in the it's in the service of I guess sort of dramatic realism or the the the the perception of of realism here. I couldn't possibly say that thing. These are honourable men, apart from Wickham who isn't. The added delight for consumers of these novels was working out the hidden meaning behind the saucy little dash. A tantalizing mystery that promised to be revealed with a careful read.

So as well as adding realism to a story, the Dash as a censoring device was a clever piece of marketing, helping sell these shiny new works of fiction to an increasingly literate population.

And M Dashius only exploded from there. According to one 2018 academic study, Dash usage in the English language rose sharply in the 19th century. If there was a golden age for the Dash, this was it. Charles Dickens was relatively stingy. Oliver Twist has 703 dashes, or one dash every 224 words. Herman Melville was undoubtedly a fan. Moby Dick clocks in with one dash every 129 words. and Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece, one dash every ninety.

A lot of this widespread adoption caught on because of how versatile the M dash can be. At its very core, the M dash signifies a visual pause on the page, and so in that way it could easily stand in for other grammatical pauses, like the comma or colon, or semicolon, except, you know, a little more fun. It's such a useful thing. It it allows you to do a kind of a U-turn within a sentence. I've heard it described as being useful for special effects.

when you want to introduce a real change in tone or sentiment or direction, or when you want to set up a punchline, for example. But importantly, the M dash was a punctuation mark that can make a sentence feel more human. In real life, we are naturally changing thoughts, cutting off others, or cutting off ourselves.

And one American poet would come to be defined by this punctuation mark more than any other, using them not for the way we talk, but to fathom the workings of the human mind. Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye. Much sense the starkest madness. Tis the majority in this as all prevails. Assent and you are sane. Demur, you're straightway dangerous and handled with a chain. That is the Dashladen poetry of Emily Dickinson, as read by my former English professor at Cambridge.

My name is Fiona Green. I'm a fellow at Jesus College and a lecturer at the English Faculty, and I've been here for about 30 years, if you can believe it. And I've done a lot of work on Dickinson, and she's one of my favourite poets. How are we doing? Perfect. Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems in Amherst, Massachusetts, many of them composed during the Civil War. She put into verse the challenges of life, death, and everything in between, accompanied by thousands of dashes.

Mae'r hyn yn fawr iawn ac yn fawr iawn ac mae'r hyn yn fawr iawn, ac mae'r hyn yn fawr iawn. Mae'r hyn yn fawr iawn. Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw. Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw. With one word in between two lines. It's a void where we can pour in our ideas. That makes it sound really sloppy and I don't think she's a sloppy thinker. I think that uh she's a quick quick thinker.

Dickinson used dashes to quickly move on to the next thought, caring less about completion than pinning down her unique insights of the human experience onto paper. She exploited unfinishedness. Rydw i'r hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny'n cael hynny. And in that story, the dash and that suspendedness.

that suspendedness of d decision over punctuation is part of the unfinishedness of the poem. It's not clear to me that she was writing something that primarily, if at all, for publication.

Dickinson never gave a reason for using dashes instead of other punctuation marks, leading to decades of academic inquiry and speculation. It feels as though she used the flexibility of the dash to introduce even more ambiguity to a poem's meaning. So there's a very famous poem called Publication is the auction of the mind of man. Can we read it? So, publication is the auction of the mind of man. Poverty be justifying for so foul a thing.

Possibly. But we would rather from our garret go white unto the white creator than invest our snow. Well, but listen, th how how would you read it? Read it with the dash read the dashes out loud. How do they sound? Well publication is the auction of the mind of man. Poverty be justifying for so foul a thing. So you th so you're assuming that a dash is a pause? and what is actually overriding any kind of punctuation is the metre.

We know how it goes. Publication is the auction of the mind of man, poverty be justifying for so foul a thing. So the the metrical frame overrides any kind of punctuation, particularly when it's this very familiar ballad form. Yeah. You can't hear the dashes. Mind mind blown. That so often twenty-five years ago. When Emily Dickinson died in eighteen eighty six at the age of fifty five, her handwritten poems were edited and published by Mabel Lewis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

They gave the poems titles, capitalized words, and crucially removed most of her dashes. Look, I know I am reducing her mind-altering verse to a set of statistics, but I've counted all the dashes left out in the first collection of poems Todd and Higginson published in 1890. Out of the 1,151 dashes, they kept just 52 of them. That's a big, big change to how the poems look on the page, even if, as Fiona says, it didn't change how they were read out.

I think they put her into circulation in a way that was legible to a nineteenth century audience. Yes. So it looks to us like a hatchet job, but it looks to that readership in the eighteen nineties as something familiar, something they can read. It's avant garde, it's It's strange, it's un it's unusual. And it doesn't feel like nineteenth century thinking in lots of ways.

Her first posthumous collection was a sensation, and her poems have never gone out of print. But it was not the first time in English literary history Grammar Purius felt that the dash count was too high for the times. Ever since the M-dash became a widely adopted punctuation mark, it has faced backlash.

A century before Dickinson, Jonathan Swift mocked excessive use of the dash by contemporary writers in a long satirical poem In modern wit, all printed trash is set off with numerous breaks and dashes. Almost a century later, an anonymous reviewer for the British Critic said this about a poem by Lord Byron. We must protest against the effect of dashes, which occur without any reason whatsoever, sometimes twice or thrice in one line, and never less than a dozen times in a page.

And while Jane Austen's dashes may have titillated her readers, with her editors it was a different story. Recently, a writer and comedian named Cressy Cornice spent two years studying the dashes in Jane Austen's published and unpublished works. And she estimates that over six thousand M dashes were edited out from pride and prejudice. It's easy to overuse the dash.

Keith Houston again. It's a really useful mark. I have to do it myself. I mean I'm I know Jane Austen, but um I do have to I do have to self-edit. um to stop myself using it all the time. Even today, modern guardians of grammar like the Chicago Manual of Style warn writers like Keith against dash overusage with the catchy rhyme, If in doubt, edit them out.

Even Fiona Green, my professor and Emily Dickinson Maven, believes that as versatile as it is, other more targeted punctuation can be necessary for clarity. I was thinking of certain prose writers, I better not say who, who I think used the dash so as to sound lyrical. Mae'n unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw unrhyw

As far as punctuation is concerned, the M dash could be a bit divisive, and for centuries critics, editors, technical writers, and authors of various op-eds have opined over whether it's a mark of lazy grammar. But divisive or not, that never stopped great writers like Henry James, Jack Kerouac, or Brian Vance from Stumptown Savings from using it in spades. You know, let me read one of those entries again. So safe catch elite wild can tuna, comma, select varieties, m-2 for six.

And I'm doing that deliberately because I'm trying to really call out the pricing separate from the item to like make that stand out. Clearly, Brian is and always will be a fan of the M-Dash. Which is why he was dismayed in 2025 when the M dash got dragged into the debate about whether it's a clear signal that the text was written by AI. A lot of what I had been seeing over the past six months.

really is that, you know, the M dash is a dead giveaway that someone's using Chat GBT. But some people see an M dash probably for, you know, the hundredth time this week, um, and they instantly assume ChatGPT wrote that. People around the internet started to notice that many large language models like ChatGPT have the tendency to deploy the end dash with reckless abandon.

It was to the point that some, well, younger generations, who might be more attuned to reading emails and text messages, began referring to it as something else. Chat GPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at the moment, okay?

Pretty Little Thing recently had a rebrand. The top most light comment was someone being like, I can't believe their lip chat is too hyphen in. It's a longer hyphen. I don't know if you've noticed it. Advice that we've been given and everyone should take it. Public service announcement, take out the hyphen.

This mark that was so heavily relied upon by the likes of Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson is now being referred to as the ChatGPT hyphen. That is how much people are connecting it with artificial intelligence. So how is it that a punctuation mark used for hundreds of years to make writing feel more human became a captcha for machine-generated text?

When Theo Vaughn asked Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, about this on his podcast, Altman claimed he added the dashes for lolz. لماذا تشعب بجيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزيزي

figures out what the model's personality should be like and how it should behave. And a lot of users like M dashes. So we added more M dashes. And now I think we have too many M dashes. But that's the answer is it was just like users liked it, we put more in. Now it's like a little bit of a meme and it's kind of it's quite annoying to me. We should we should fix that.

It's not entirely clear whether Altman's telling us the whole story, and industry insiders like Sean Gedeker believe it's much more complicated than that. To find the answer. There's there's not the kind of consensus on the topic that that you would expect for something uh so observable. Certainly all of the closed models, i.e. all of the best models, uh the the process of training them is is a trade secret.

Sean says that this is a pretty recent phenomenon and that ChatGPT hasn't always used a lot of M dashes in its writing. So GPT three point five came out in um November twenty twenty two uh and didn't use a lot of M dashes. Around that time, OpenAI's language model had mostly been trained on publicly available data around the web, things like websites, articles, blogs, pirated books.

Around six hundred thousand Enron emails. Probably not a ton of M dashes used in those Enron emails. And then uh July twenty twenty four, by that time the models were producing a lot of M dashes. So this this kind of, you know, just under two year window. Chat GPT users all began to notice not just that M dashes were frequently used, but that the LLM wouldn't stop using it.

Numerous open AI and Reddit threads from frustrated users claim that no matter how much they prompted to avoid M dashes, the AI would insert them back in. Sean wondered what was going on in that time frame that led to the emergence of the M dash. And in june twenty twenty five he got the clue he needed. Anthropic, the company behind the LLM Clawed and one of OpenAI's main competitors, were forced to reveal their methods in a lawsuit.

These companies began to search for more data. And in particular, they searched for print books, uh print books from older decades uh that that perhaps weren't as represented in the in the previous training data. Court documents have shown that Anthropic aimed to expand the language model not just by feeding it information that was publicly available on the web, but quite literally all the books in the world.

In a process called destructive scanning, Anthropic bought millions of books, cut the pages out of their bindings, and digitized them to feed Claude. Sean suspects the model's ravenous appetite for words most likely included all of the great authors of our time. M dashes and all. I again this is pure speculation on my part. Uh they kind of picked up the stylistic habits of these like classic literature texts.

which seem very incongruous when people use them today to write emails and job applications and that kind of thing. So if you were to train language models on a bunch of late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds English They might end up using M-dashes as much as those books do, which today would seem like overuse. And with that, the dash has now passed from the hand of Shakespeare into the vast data centers of this new age.

It is of course reductive to assume any bit of writing that contains an M dash was written by AI. In fact, the reason why LLMs add M dashes to generated text is because it's a mark that we have used for literally hundreds of years in published writing. At least for now, there are still subtle hints that a piece of writing has been composed using AI, a formal tone, specific vocabulary words, a certain kind of beige to the writing itself.

But there is something about that long, elegant dash on a page that makes it easy to pick out and pick on. It's An easy mark. The MDash may have gotten unfairly caught up in the bigger existential dread around AI. It goes without saying, though, that there are bigger issues at stake than ruminating over a piece of punctuation, and not everyone has lost their focus.

or their minds. Does punctuation really make people angry? I mean there are so many things in the world to make you angry As an educator, it's not necessarily spotting the difference between real and fake that gets Dr. Fiona Green's blood boiling. What concerns her is that people don't seem to understand what they are surrendering when they allow AI to do the hard parts for them. mean that the hard parts are precisely what it's all about.

Every rabbit hole that you accidentally go down matters. M misreading things and reading something boring and stopping halfway through and so on and so on. All of that. is part of the study. You see these lights go on all the time, right? It you went like this earlier, phew, you know mind blow. It changes the way people think. It rewires their brain, okay? So why would we introduce a machine? Why would we outsource exactly that perfect moment?

something else. It's the process of learning that then sends you out as a different human. In November of 2025, Sam Altman announced the news to M-Dash haters and lovers around the world. Small but happy win. If you tell Chat GPT not to use M-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. Perhaps with this update, some AI users will abandon dashes entirely, which I cannot say I am too cut up about.

After all these years and after countless adventures together, the Mdash belongs back with us humans. What's your favourite poem? I do have a favourite. It starts, I felt a cleaving in my mind. You know that one? I don't. I asked Fiona if she'd send us out with her favourite poem by Emily M. Dash Dickinson. And in the unsure, maddening future we are heading towards, the choice felt appropriate. I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split.

I tried to match it seam by seam, but could not make them fit. The thought behind I strove to join unto the thought before, but sequence ravelled out of sound. Like balls upon. Isn't that wild? Coming up will tell us me about one weapon in the battle against AI writing: typography. Stay with us. McDonald's är stolt sponsor av Melodifestivalten, så tillåt oss att presentera ett av vår. Festivalmenyn, Star Cream Onion och Company, 4 Peppers.

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So we're back with Will Aspinall uh and in the main story you talked about how the M dash got caught up in the sort of existential dread that comes along with AI and there's been kind of the stigma associated with using the M dash, how it's the sort of like this smoking gun that if you see an M dash it means that this thing was written by AI.

And it's gotten to the point where people actively avoid using the punctuation because they're trying to avoid the accusation of using AI for their writing. Um, but you're here because you want to talk about the this really inventive design led solution that's a more positive spin on this whole situation. Yeah, exactly. So instead of obsessively monitoring your M dash usage,

And taking steps to exterminate them, or you know, perhaps like me, thumb your nose at the Grammar Police and actually up M-dash use exponentially. A creative agency based in Sydney, Australia called Coco Gun has opted for another approach. A redesign of the M dash called the AM dash. Okay, so what is the am dash exactly? So the am dash is a new punctuation mark that you would use exactly like an m dash.

Um for pauses, commas, as a colon, or just for some dramatic flair. But it looks a little different. So um here's a picture. Can you see that, Roman? Yes. Uh so uh this is like the M dash, it's this long bar but Uh you know, at the left end it kind of curves down and the right end it curves up. It's kind of like an M dash with serifs on it, sort of like a tilde. Exactly, yeah. And um my initial reaction was it looks like one of those kind of suave twenties

style pencil moustaches. So the idea is that you put one or more of these babies in your writing instead of an M dash. And you'll never be confused for a machine or be accused of using one. Because it's its very scarcity is that what makes it AI proof. Uh because language models go on probability. The likelihood of chat GPT using an AMDASH instead of an M is infinitesimally small.

Is there a way of making a statement? Is it a bit of a I don't mean a human fight back in a kind of like, yeah, let's man the fences and kind of tear down the you know, the hour and all that kind of thing, but just to make a pointed comment on where we are in culture with this thing. That's uh Aunt Melder, the co founder of Coca Gun in Sydney.

He said that the AMDash came about in trying to find the appropriate response to the rise of AI writing. We wanted it to be rooted in a real love of writing. It just kind of really sucks that um people would outsource all writing to you know, to a machine, to an algorithm. Okay, so if I'm understanding this correctly.

Using an am dash instead of an M dash is kind of this symbolic way to signal that the text that I am writing has been typed up by me, a human, because an LLM wouldn't ever think to insert an AM dash. That's right. That's right. So how does one even use an M dash? Like I didn't know I didn't know such a thing existed. Like how do you actually insert it into whatever word processor you're using?

Okay, so yeah, to get it requires downloading two fonts developed by Coca Gun. They're called Times New Human, which is the serif option, and A Real, which is the Sons. Okay. So they're they're doing a whole thing here, okay. Yeah, there's a lot of puns in this. There's a lot of puns, which I love. I love a good pun. Um and then to use it you simply type am and uh hyphen and it'll insert that little mustachio dash into your into your work.

So to replace the M dash with the AM takes a very human type commitment and that is one of the reasons I really, really like this idea. It's the sheer eccentric humanity of this project. Okay, it's really, really low stakes. But the response has surprised Ant with thousands of downloads since its release in May twenty twenty five.

We didn't really think we'd get that many downloads. We thought there'd be maybe a couple of hundred and that'd be it. And the more it's used, every time someone uses it, that's a kind of an example of, you know, that's another Um flag in the sand, I guess. So the real challenge for the Amdash is getting accepted by Unicode and and being one of almost 160,000 characters in the current book.

An ant said that seeing the Amdash appear in the wild would really be a crowning achievement. If there was an article in the New York Times, like a headline headline in the New York Times that'd use the Amdash, that would be just uh that'd be, you know Oh, dream come true. I'm helping out Ant because I showed it to Brian Vance of Stump Town Savings Fame and he was very taken with it. So, you know, who knows?

If you're in the Portland, Oregon area, you might get to see the AM dash being used to highlight the low, low price of tuna. And that would be a really neat end to the all deal Brian's been through. But you know, this brings to mind an issue which is as it gets used out in the wild, then it does get picked up by L LMs and then it would be regurgitated by you know, some kind of AI composer.

I mean, I would say there's a huge imbalance this is a David and Goliath story, right? And you know, currently uh the M dash is everywhere and a few little am dashes. I mean, you know, we'd we'd might be very old men by the time that happens. I see. I see. So we can win these, you know, like battles for right now. And and worry about the overall war later. That's it. The moment is now. Well, this is great. Thank you so much for this story about the Amdash.

And its predecessor, the M Dash. Um, this has been such a fun episode to make. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Roman. Um, if you want to start using it, go to theamdash.com where there are links to downloading Time's New Human and A Real. Nice.

ninety nine percent invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall and edited by Vivian Leigh, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Fact checking by Graham Haysha, who did unfortunately need to hand count the number of M dashes in Emily Dickinson's work for this story.

I'm so sorry about that, Graham. Special thanks this week to Sam Byrne, who performed the readings of our literary characters, and to Grant Hutchinson for his illuminating page on the M dash on his website, Okafuge.com. Kathy Two is our executive producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Crisper Rube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime.

Jacob Medina Gleason, Talent and Rain Stradley, and Me Roman Mars. The ninety-nine percent invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building, in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server, there's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

For the record, this episode contained 68 M-dashes, which I believe earns us a three on the Dickinson M-dash scale. McDonald's är stolt sponsor av Melodifestivalten så tillåt oss att presentera ett av våra bidrag. Festivalmenyn. Sour Krim Onion Company Fyra Peppers. Och en apple pie för 99 kronor. Festivalmaten finns på McDonald's. Grannen är som bäst när man vinner tillsammans. Om turen håller sig framme kan ni få dela på 101 miljoner. Ta chansen nu i mars på polskårteriet.se.

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