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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

This is not the first treatise on this subject to make it to the hn front page.

The problem is, I don't recognise it has having ever been a big thing. I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes. Semi-colons are just as rare. I think both were always niche.

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> The problem is, I don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

This is not a problem. Or rather, it is not a problem in the way that I think you mean.

Em dashes do not need to be a big thing to be useful, which they are; they also do not need anyone's personal recognition to do their jobs.

The problem may, in fact, be that they used to be more of a niche punctuation mark that people were not very familiar with. Now that LLMs have fallen in love with them and throw them around like candy, if people have hardly ever seen them used in well-written text before, they might treat them alone as a much stronger signal for LLM generation than they should — which is precisely what is bringing em-dashes under fire these days, and hence results TFA.

So, yes, indeed, in some ways the problem is, that you don't recognise it has ever been a big thing.

It depends on who and what you read. Since they became controversial, I notice them more. Charles Dickens used them both regularly--most pages seem to have both.

Virginia Woolf's writing has the most semi-colons I've seen and almost as many em-dashes. It fits her stream of consciousness style where there are very few hard stops.

Jack Vance used semi-colons in almost the opposite fashion to increase the tempo by having short clauses without using conjunctions. His action scenes are sometimes almost staccato.

Just today I'm reading Patricia McKillip and noticed she also used a lot of em-dashes.

> I tend to read books from the early to mid 20th century. I don't notice lots of dashes.

They are more prevalent in nonfiction.

I see them prevalent in fiction just as well. Looking at the first few pages of a few random works of fiction, continuing from my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46400974

- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925: 28 on the first 10 pages https://archive.org/details/greatgatsby0000fitz_i1g1/page/n9...

- Love among the chickens, P. G. Wodehouse, 1909: 15 on the first 16 pages (and some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!) https://archive.org/details/loveamongchicken00wodeuoft/page/...

- Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham, 1915: eight on the first ten pages https://archive.org/details/ofhumanbondage0000wsom_j3w4/page...

- Howards End, E.M. Forster, 1910: at least 49 in the first ten pages https://archive.org/details/howardsend0000fors_q9r3/page/n9/...

> some of them spaced and extra long; apparently this publisher had a very “inflationary” style!

It's pretty common to see a single em-dash for the comma-like parenthetical usage (p6 etc.) and a double em-dash for the "someone's dialogue was interrupted and cut off" usage (p15).

The "I'm redacting this name" usage (p11) often uses two em-dashes too, although Wodehouse('s typesetter) doesn't in this case.

You have successfully proved me wrong. I have read some of those books, and merely not noticed the prevelance of dashes! Perhaps that is proof they used them well?

I'm 63 and tend to communicate in full sentences, that often include semi-colons and differentiate between - and -- based on context.

I asked Perplexity in a months long development task that is both complex and complicated what punctuation I should utilize to minimize token and computational cost to get best results, and using semi-colons to delineate related requests in a single prompt was best. Separate prompts for different aspects of the specific projects, or double spaces between sentences. Placing commas inside or outside quotes wasn't mentioned. But third most important, according to Perplexity, was capitalizing important words even if they weren't proper nounds, which I did not expect but now fear I will over-use (I still write thank-you letters by hand, so YMMV!)

I use semi-colons frequently, probably at least a half dozen times/week.

Em-dashes not so much, but I'm so deathly sick of people complaining that some piece of text must be LLM-generated that I feel the need to start using it as well.

I feel like programmers use semi-colons more often; we're more familiar with them.

Erlang (and probably Prolog, but my memories there are fuzzy) use periods, commas, and semi-colons in a directly analogous way to English.

I wonder if there are languages of programming that use em-dashes?

APL seemed the likeliest candidate, but no such luck.

true, perhaps, but a colon would have been more appropriate here and programmers should be familiar enough with them also.

I'm the opposite. I use hyphens/dashes all the time, and almost never a semicolon. My English professor complained about my overuse.

Can you name some books as example? I picked a few random books from the period you mentioned, both fiction and non-fiction, and checked the first few pages of each; most of them had a good number of em dashes (or spaced en dashes, depending on the publisher's typographic style). For example:

- Leave It to Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse, 1923: five on the first two pages https://archive.org/details/bwb_O8-BSS-318/page/10/mode/2up

- Kim, Rudyard Kipling, 1901 (1913): fourteen on the first three pages https://archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1530/page/1/mode/2up

- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926 (1954 printing?): ok, I admit Hemingway was very spare with punctuation; I noticed none https://archive.org/details/bwb_C0-BHF-057/page/2/mode/2up

- Men of Mathematics vol 2, E. T. Bell, 1937 (1953 printing): two in the three pages of the Preface https://archive.org/details/MenOfMathematics/page/n5/mode/2u...

- The Story of Philosophy, Will Durant, 1926 (1962 printing?): seven in the first five pages https://archive.org/details/THESTORYOFPHILOSOPHY1TheLivesAnd...

- The American Language, H. L. Mencken, 1919: ten in the four pages of the preface https://archive.org/details/americanlanguage00mencuoft/page/...

(The counts are just the ones I noticed; there may be more.)

Are the books you read very different, or do you have a different threshold for "rare"/"niche"?

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