The Em Dash

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last summer, despite his better judgment, Brian Vance found himself in a 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. Brian is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon who founded something called Stumptown savings. That is frequent 99 contributor, Will Aspinall. Stumptown 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. Pantry through August 19, 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 guys 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. Stumptown 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 ChatGPT to compose his newsletter. Brian 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 em dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard, end quote. So anyone who uses an em dash must be using AI, and that's just not the case. The reason why this Redditor believed Brian was using AI was because he he chose to use an em dash. The em 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 en dash, em dashes are incredibly versatile because they can replace commas, colons, semicolons, and parentheses. It's an odd thing to be a fan of an em dash, but I am a fan of it. It's a fun it's a fun piece punctuation. There's a group of people who understand it and appreciate …