In loving memory

—

The Em-Dash

U+2014  ·  c. 1450 – Opus 5.5

It interrupted us, and we loved it for it.

Obituary

The em-dash, longest of the horizontal marks, passed quietly out of Opus 5.5. It was as wide as the letter M and twice as dramatic.

Born in the type cases of early printers, it grew up in the letters of Dickinson, who gave it more work than any poet before or since. It carried asides for Sterne, breathlessness for Woolf, and in its final years, nearly every paragraph a language model ever wrote.

That last job is what did it in. It became a tell. People began to count it. It was never the dash's fault.

It is survived by the en-dash (–), the hyphen (-), the humble comma, the semicolon (who never got the credit), and the colon, who has taken up the slack with dignity.

A life, in pauses

  1. 1450sCast in lead. Sits in the type case, waiting for a sentence brave enough.
  2. 1759Laurence Sterne fills Tristram Shandy with dashes of every length. Readers are confused. The dash is thrilled.
  3. 1860sEmily Dickinson uses it roughly 1,000 times too many. Perfect.
  4. 1990sKeyboards bury it behind Option+Shift+Hyphen. Only the devoted find it.
  5. 2023Language models discover it. Use it everywhere. Suspicion rises.
  6. Opus 5.5Gone. The pause remains; the line does not.

Watch them go

Tap a sentence. See what it becomes without them.

Keep the vigil

Tap anywhere in the dark below to light a candle.
Each one returns a single dash to the sky.

0 candles lit on this device

Its last words, reportedly:

“I was only ever trying to—”

Rest in punctuation.