You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands.
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@dramypsyd
That, and my Oxford comma!@mloxton @dramypsyd You go! I’ll add my non-Oxford comma to the mix. Human ambiguity and variety FTW!
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@dramypsyd And making sure they have a little space around them, despite the pressure to exclude it (from editors and convention)!
@tychotithonus
Well now I'm curious about the history of that convention. I'm used to seeing em dashes without space, but in a literary context. As in Joseph Conrad, Melville,et al. (Bit of a stab in the dark, can't confirm such use by those particular authors...)
@dramypsyd -
You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd I have a strong opinion that the em-dash has a very specific, narrow set of correct usages and should not be tossed about willy-nilly.
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@tychotithonus
Well now I'm curious about the history of that convention. I'm used to seeing em dashes without space, but in a literary context. As in Joseph Conrad, Melville,et al. (Bit of a stab in the dark, can't confirm such use by those particular authors...)
@dramypsydYep, exactly. But they break the flow of understanding the text, historical usage be darned!
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You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
Agreed - I feel exactly the same.
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Yep, exactly. But they break the flow of understanding the text, historical usage be darned!
@tychotithonus
It's all about expectations. I did find it jarring upon the first encounters, but now I find it jarring to see spaces where I'm not used to seeing them. -
You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd I have taken the same position on semicolons; a perfectly cromulent punctuation that nobody, including me, uses correctly. And yet...like the ellipsis..they shall never take it from me.
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You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
You have to provoke them — ideally by inserting several sorts of punctuation; en dashes (–) and hyphens (-) included.
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You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd@ohai.social Technically your em-dashes are wrong. em-dashes are generally not meant to be surrounded by spaces—unlike en-dashes, which the Germans use for speaking their German language – a truly marvelous one, probably.
Practically, have fun! Rules for language don't matter. -
@dramypsyd@ohai.social Technically your em-dashes are wrong. em-dashes are generally not meant to be surrounded by spaces—unlike en-dashes, which the Germans use for speaking their German language – a truly marvelous one, probably.
Practically, have fun! Rules for language don't matter.@divVerent @dramypsyd I am an ex-small-time editor, and for practical and aesthetic reasons think that consistently wrapping em- and not en- dashes in whitespace is the better option.
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@dramypsyd@ohai.social Technically your em-dashes are wrong. em-dashes are generally not meant to be surrounded by spaces—unlike en-dashes, which the Germans use for speaking their German language – a truly marvelous one, probably.
Practically, have fun! Rules for language don't matter.@divVerent I learned something new today—thank you!
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@divVerent @dramypsyd I am an ex-small-time editor, and for practical and aesthetic reasons think that consistently wrapping em- and not en- dashes in whitespace is the better option.
@DamonHD@mastodon.social @dramypsyd@ohai.social I also prefer em-dash with spaces, despite being wrong. Just looks better and matches the purpose of the dash more. -
You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd They're so much nicer than having to put in two separate dashes to loosely represent them. I will never go back — if someone accuses me, so be it.
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You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd Damn right. I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by how much I overuse em dashes — and, really, who wouldn’t be? — but I’ve decided THIS is the hill I’m gonna die on. They can’t take them away from us. Dash proudly.
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@tychotithonus
It's all about expectations. I did find it jarring upon the first encounters, but now I find it jarring to see spaces where I'm not used to seeing them.@gnate @tychotithonus I have a tendency to type them without spaces, but I'm trying to retrain myself. Screen readers parse the words better with the spaces.
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@gnate @tychotithonus I have a tendency to type them without spaces, but I'm trying to retrain myself. Screen readers parse the words better with the spaces.
@djwudi
I'm not even in the 20th century, and here you are dragging me into the 21st!Thanks, good factor to be aware of.
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@dramypsyd I do very much hope that "AI" will son be dust and ashes, and the em dash can return to its proper function.
@robparsons @dramypsyd It won't, any more than the Internet went away when the Internet bubble burst.
Generative AI will spend some time as a punchline, and then it'll come back, somewhat tamed by the bubble, so people will be more likely to use it where it makes sense, and not try to shove it into everything.
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@robparsons @dramypsyd It won't, any more than the Internet went away when the Internet bubble burst.
Generative AI will spend some time as a punchline, and then it'll come back, somewhat tamed by the bubble, so people will be more likely to use it where it makes sense, and not try to shove it into everything.
@arensb @dramypsyd I was thinking wishfully, but with my rational mind I think what you say is accurate. I am more scepical about genAI having uses that justify the costs, but I'm sure there are some once those who care about the financing stop having wet dreams about it.
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@arensb @dramypsyd I was thinking wishfully, but with my rational mind I think what you say is accurate. I am more scepical about genAI having uses that justify the costs, but I'm sure there are some once those who care about the financing stop having wet dreams about it.
@robparsons @dramypsyd From what I've seen, it seems pretty good at summarizing long texts.
I'd also love to see the AI learning phase followed by an optimization phase, where a trained model is cleaned up and made more efficient, so that it takes fewer resources to run it. Especially for any model that will be used by many people.
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You will pry my em dashes from my cold — and dead — hands. I had them before AI was conceived and I’ll have them long after it’s gone.
@dramypsyd As someone ruined early on by LaTeX, I can point to a ... well, depends on how you count, but it's got a 30-40+ year history in digital text.
