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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21812 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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em-dashes

This is not relevant to the larger discussion here, but I truly hate that em dashes have become a potential signifier of AI slop. I love em dashes! They’re not a mere substitute for parentheses or commas or semicolons, they’re a useful punctuation mark in their own right — they break up a sentence in a unique way, creating a certain flow that other punctuation doesn’t replicate. I used them all the time for essays in school and college, and I still use them in reports for work.

It galls me that a piece of my personal writing style has been co-opted years later by a robot, and now the robot gets all the credit for it.

Wait, I've not heard this one - does ChatGPT garbage use dashes the way I just did?

Are LLMs using my own writing style?

Fuck, I love using those, too. I hate that AI's co-opted it.

You may not be old enough to pull this off, but you can always claim "I'm a Mac user, not a robot dammit" -- the ability to insert em dashes (along with other typographical flourishes) was kind of a big cleavage point between the creative different-thinkers and the sweaty geeks/corporate drones going back to the 80s.

This claim will be more credible if you format everything in Garamond Narrow.

I believe LibreOffice/OpenOffice's Word equivalent can do em-dashes, too, if you type -- and another word right after it.

Yeah I'm a little too young to sell that one, lol. Although, funny enough, my family computer growing up was a Mac...

It helps if you have a bookshelf like this:

https://preview.redd.it/5w31lki43nt41.jpg?width=737&auto=webp&s=38428adb02ff5e5520e194cb18248c1f9d64dce1

(@MadMonzer as well -- the corporate drudges graphic designers were probably big Mac Users too!)

I've only came across Garamond in the context of soulless corporate drudgery (specifically, it was the official serif font of the old Shell before it got caught in a reserves mis-representation scandal in 2004 and was forced to become a more normal company).

Apple used to use a bespoke variant called "Apple Garamond" in all their marketing material. It's not quite the same as ITC Garamond Narrow but close enough.

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