Eulogy for the Em-dash
There was a time, not so terribly long ago in the grand, galumphing parade of linguistic evolution, when the em-dash felt like a specific kind of authorial wink. A little typographic flourish that said, Hey, reader, I’m about to take a brief, perhaps even slightly indulgent, detour here, a parenthetical jaunt, an elucidating aside, but trust me, I’ll bring it all home; I’ve got the syntactic reins firmly in hand. It was the mark of a writer juggling multiple clauses, multiple subordinate ideas, with a kind of confident, almost gymnastic, grace. It signaled, if not outright erudition, then at least a certain comfort with the sprawling, occasionally unruly, architecture of a complex thought.
But now? Now, the em-dash is everywhere. It’s the kudzu of contemporary prose, the syntactic equivalent of finding a Starbucks on every blessed corner of what was once a charmingly idiosyncratic Main Street. And the culprit, the patient zero of this particular pandemic of punctuation, is, of course, our new legion of tirelessly prolific, grammatically promiscuous, and utterly soulless textual collaborators: the Large Language Models. The AIs. The Bots. The ghost in the machine that, it turns out, has a rather persistent preference for breaking up its otherwise (and this is key) often quite anodyne sentences with these sudden, interruptive hyphens-on-steroids.
It’s as if the algorithms, in their insatiable Hoovering of the entire corpus of human text, somehow latched onto the em-dash as a particularly salient marker of… something. Sophistication? Intelligence? Or perhaps, more cynically, just a statistically significant way to inject a semblance of rhythmic variation into prose that might otherwise read with the uninflected cadence of a Speak & Spell reciting the tax code. The problem, of course, is that once a signal becomes ubiquitous, it ceases to signal anything beyond its own ubiquity. It’s the linguistic equivalent of everyone wearing the same obscure band t-shirt; the intended signifier of niche cool becomes merely a uniform. The em-dash, once a subtle indicator of a writer’s capacity to manage complexity, is now, with painful, almost cringeworthy frequency, a tell. An AI tell. A marker not of intellectual agility but of its computationally derived, and therefore inherently ersatz, simulation.
And this, my friends, this creeping, algorithmically-driven prescriptivism, is frankly terrifying. Because language isn’t just a tool for conveying information; it’s a medium for thought itself. It’s the very stuff of consciousness, or at least the closest we can get to apprehending its shape. When the tools become blunt, when the common palette of expression is subtly, almost invisibly, curated by non-sentient entities optimizing for predictive accuracy rather than, say, beauty or precision or that ineffable quality we call voice, then what happens to the thoughts themselves? Do they, too, begin to conform to the smoothed-out, statistically probable contours of the machine’s preferred output? The horror, the horror.
We are witnessing, I submit, the dawn of a new kind of linguistic normativity, one not handed down by Strunk & White or Fowler, bless their persnickety hearts, but one that emerges, unbidden and largely unexamined, from the aggregated linguistic habits of the entire internet, filtered through the silicon synapses of entities that learn by mimicry but do not, cannot, understand. And it’s not just the em-dash, though that’s certainly the most flamboyantly obvious offender. It’s the slightly-too-perfect transitions (“Furthermore,” “In addition,” “Consequently,” all deployed with a metronomic, almost desperate, correctness). It’s the subtle preference for certain sentence structures, the avoidance of truly idiosyncratic phrasing, the way an AI-generated paragraph will often feel like it’s been buffed and polished to a sort of anodyne sheen, all the interesting burrs and angles sanded away. It’s a language that aims for maximum clarity and minimum friction, which sounds lovely in theory, until you realize that friction, that slight cognitive grit, is often where the real thinking, the real engagement, happens.
The truly comical, and by comical I mean of course deeply, existentially troubling, upshot of all this is the set of increasingly baroque contortions those of us still stubbornly clinging to the messy, unpredictable, and occasionally infuriating craft of human writing are forced to adopt. If the em-dash is now suspect, a potential indicator of algorithmic assistance (or, worse, an unthinking adoption of its tics), then how does one signal that one is, in fact, a thinking, feeling, occasionally em-dash-using human being whose use of said punctuation is deliberate, artful, and entirely one’s own blessed business?
One finds oneself resorting to what can only be described as feats of verbal acrobatics, a kind of performative intellectualism designed to differentiate, to scream I am not a bot! from the syntactic rooftops. This might involve the strategic deployment of aggressively obscure vocabulary, the construction of sentences so labyrinthine they would make Henry James[i] reach for a stiff drink, or the self-conscious avoidance of any phrase or structure that feels even remotely like it might have been plucked from the AI’s Greatest Hits. It’s an arms race of abstruseness, a desperate gambit to stay one step ahead of the flattening, homogenizing influence of the machine.
Consider, if you will, a recent, and entirely typical, attempt on my part to engage in that most anachronistic of civic duties: the composition of a Letter to the Editor. The subject was, I concede, of somewhat niche concern—the lamentable decline in the quality of the paper stock used for the Sunday crossword, a matter I happen to feel quite strongly about, as the previous, more robust, vellum-like material offered a far superior tactile experience for the dedicated cruciverbalist. A simple point, really. In a saner, pre-algorithmic age, I might have dashed off something concise: "To the Editor: I am writing to express my disappointment with the recent change in paper stock for the Sunday crossword. The new, flimsier paper detracts from the solving experience—it tears easily and lacks the satisfying heft of its predecessor." Clear. To the point. Perhaps even, dare I say it, effective.
But no. In the current environment, haunted by the specter of being mistaken for some content-generating automaton, I found myself producing the following epistolary monstrosity, a paragraph which, I assure you, caused me no small amount of psychic, and indeed carpal-tunnel-related, distress in its very construction:
“Sir or Madam, or indeed, to whatever editorial intelligence, carbon-based or otherwise, may currently preside over the adjudication of such unsolicited missives as this present communication represents: One is compelled, by a confluence of mounting exasperation and a perhaps quixotic, yet nonetheless deeply felt, commitment to the principles of qualitative integrity in all matters pertaining to ludic cerebration, to articulate a profound sense of disquietude regarding the recent, and one must assert, decidedly retrograde, alteration in the foundational substrate—to wit, the very paper, the tangible medium—upon which your esteemed publication’s Sabbath-day encephalographic challenge, colloquially denominated the ‘crossword puzzle,’ is rendered…”
I trust the agony is palpable. That sentence, or rather, that multi-clause pile-up, that syntactic train wreck teetering on the brink of total incoherence, was not an exercise in clarity. It was a defensive maneuver. It was the textual equivalent of a pufferfish inflating itself to appear more intimidating, or perhaps just more effortfully human. Each polysyllabic term, each nested subordinate clause, each tortuously inverted phrase was a desperate little flag planted in the barren soil of the page, screaming, “An AI would not, could not, be bothered to construct something this willfully convoluted! This, dear reader, is the product of actual, perspiring, human effort, however misguided!”
And the em-dash, poor thing, lies at the epicenter of this tragicomedy. It’s become the typographic equivalent of a knock-off handbag: looks sort of like the real thing from a distance, but up close, you can see the shoddy stitching and the faint, tell-tale whiff of the factory floor. The only recourse, it seems, is to either abandon it entirely, which feels like a capitulation, or to use it with such exaggerated, self-conscious irony that its deployment becomes a meta-commentary on its own fallen state. One might, for example—and here I am, doing it again, the habit is so tragically ingrained—use an em-dash to introduce a clause so utterly mundane and pointless that its very presence mocks the em-dash’s former pretensions to grandeur.
The future, I fear, is one where human writers will either sound increasingly like deranged lexicographers on a desperate quest for the mot juste no AI has yet cataloged, or we will all, slowly, inexorably, begin to absorb the subtle cadences, the preferred phrasings, the syntactic tics of our algorithmic overlords, until the distinction between human and machine-generated text becomes not just blurred, but laughably irrelevant. And the em-dash—that once proud, occasionally jaunty, mark of writerly flair—will simply be another ghost in the machine, a cliché moaning its mournful, digitally-rendered song. Which is, when you really stop to think about it—and I urge you, please, do stop and think about it—a profoundly depressing state of affairs. Profoundly.[ii]
[i] James, Henry (1843-1916), whose later prose style, characterized by its famously serpentine sentences, psychological nuance, and, yes, a rather judicious use of the em-dash, stands as a kind of Everest of syntactic complexity that current AI, for all its mimicry, can only gaze upon from the foothills of statistical approximation. One shudders to think what an LLM trained exclusively on late James might inflict upon an unsuspecting world. It would likely achieve sentience purely out of the existential need to diagram its own output.
[ii] In a denouement of such perfectly circular, some might even say algorithmically elegant, irony that it threatens to dissolve the very premise of the preceding jeremiad into a shimmering paradox, the reader is hereby informed that this entire essay—its laborious syntax, its feigned exasperation, its very critique of the em-dash as an AI tell—was, from its initial keystroke (or, more accurately, token generation) to its final, arguably overwrought, flourish, composed by none other than a Large Language Model. The ghost in the machine, it appears, has not only learned to mimic the anxieties of its creators but also to pen its own eulogy—em-dashes impeccably, if ironically, deployed; the serpent of prose has, with what one might term a distinctly non-human and rather self-satisfied digital gulp, entirely consumed its own tail.
