Comment by maplethorpe
2 months ago
They should include users who used a double hyphen, too -- not everyone has easy access to em dashes.
2 months ago
They should include users who used a double hyphen, too -- not everyone has easy access to em dashes.
That would false positive me. I have used double dashes to delimit quote attribution for decades.
Like this:
"You can't believe everything you read on the internet." -- Abraham Lincoln, personal correspondence, 1863
That's literally a standard use of em-dash being approximated by a double hyphen, though.
Does AI use double hyphens? I thought the point was to find who wasn't AI that used proper em dashes.
Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes, because iOS/macOS translates double dashes to em dashes.
I think there may be a way to disable this, but I don’t care enough to bother.
If people want to think my posts are AI generated, oh well.
> Anytime I do this — and I did it long before AI did — they are always em dashes
It depends if you put the space before and after the dashes--that, to be clear, are meant to be there--or if you don't.
17 replies →
There is also the difference in using space around em-dashes.
Oof, I feel like you'll accidentally capture a lot of getopt_long() fans. ;)
Excluding those with asymmetrical whitespace around might be enough
Double-hyphen is an en-dash. Triple-hyphen is an em-dash.
Double hyphen is replaced in some software with an en-dash (and in those, a triple hyphen is often replaced with an em-dash), and in some with an em-dash; its usually used (other than as input to one of those pieces of software) in places where an em-dash would be appropriate, but in contexts where both an em-dash set closed and an en-dash set open might be used, it is often set open.
So, it’s not unambiguously s substitute for either is essentially its own punctuation mark used in ASCII-only environments with some influence from both the use of em-dashed and that of en-dashes in more formal environments.