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You can pry my em dash—short for "Emily's dash", after the poet—from my cold dead hands.

Close, it's the width of the 'M' from the the famous author EMdash Forster's name. ;)

Not even close. It's named after the em drive, after how fast it helps your thoughts flow to written word.

I thought it was a reference to "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caedite_eos._Novit_enim_Dominu....

How is there this much misinformation out there about this? It's a neologism based on the character M from the James Bond franchise. Do a little free-association from the phrase "Bond—James Bond" and you end up calling that the M-dash.

Until that relatively recent shift, it was named the Morse Dash—you'd think because of the "long" glyph when rendering Morse Code, but no, it was named for the 17th century English Catholic martyr Henry Morse, for reasons lost to time.

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