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!

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.

By 2022, doing the same would be a political statement.

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.

Now everyone asks me what AI I’m using

https://books.google.com/books?id=c6MIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA86

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20844

But if I understand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395467 correctly, this em-dash broadside was itself AI-generated, so any similarity to the above might be completely unintended by the human who wrote the prompt. (Anyway, the similarity is superficial or spiritual at best.)

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?

Now if you were willing to switch to en-dashes, maybe we could overlook the overexuberance. ;-)

I don’t regularly use en-dashes, cause I don’t know how to make them.

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?

Choose your poison at https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Pd

tldr: use spaces around em dashes

Especially when there's never any context where you can create a minimal pair between two utterances that would give them a different meaning depending on which dash was used. An em-dash is just a stuck up en-dash. I even hate the terms "em-dash" and "en-dash" now, after the typographical snobbery that flooded the culture for about a decade after web fonts got invented and standardized. Frontend developers and web designers started getting big salaries and buying fancy wines and whiskies, so I had to hear the word "Helvetica" 50x a day.

It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.