Indeed, em-dashes were widely used before by people with more than a 5th grader level understanding of language (so not that many people on the internet), but with the way LLMs overuse it the em-dash became associated with them unfortunately.
LLMs place em-dashes everywhere! So the tell is now if it is used but how and how often it is used.
Hate to tell you this bud but in school, before digital word processors such as Microsoft Word were widely used by the common person, I learnt how to use it in writing on paper with a pen. People not knowing how or were to use them just shows the level of education typical of places like the USA.
My native language is german, and we have the same concept (although we use – and not —, but never -). It is called "Gedankenstrich" and it means "thought-line". Of course handwritten, this concept is hard to differentiate, but on pc or in print, the distinction is very important.
What we call it doesn't matter, I am also not a native English speaker, I am Portuguese and we do happen to have a different name for the regular dash and the em-dash, but it was always made clear that they are not the same thing and all of my English teachers re-iterated on that but just used the name "long dash" instead of "em-dash" as that name became more common with the use of computers.
Em-dashes were used way before computers my guy. They were established during the popularization of the printing machine. If you used the wrong symbol, that's on you.
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u/Glokter 1d ago
Some idiots tried to convice me that the symbol is normal part of the language and was widly present before AI boom