> no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
I am. Em-dashes, like all punctuation, were invented at some point. Even the space didn't always exist, and the em-dash is a lot more recent than that.
And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.
> And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.
Typewriters were monospaced, which gives you extremely limited scope for distinguishing hyphens and em dashes. Small wonder that they didn’t bother attempting a distinction, and then that provided the inertia for us to never get such a thing now.
Typewriters are a lowest-common-denominator sort of thing. They lacked all kinds of widely-used stuff, and some of it they killed by their omission. Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all, and the rest of the time could only do by a terrible hack.
There’s a similar story in the final death of the letter thorn (þ) in English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl...>: imported fonts lacked the character, so people substituted it with y which looked most similar, and that substitution became ubiquitous, and now most people think the first word in “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe” is pronounced /jiː/ (“ye”), whereas it was actually just how they spelled “the”, so it was /ðiː/.
It’s a general rule in such technologies: although they make many new things possible, they also damage what was there before.
> Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all
Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.
> I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward
This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.
Dead keys unfortunately cannot be used for shortcuts. This has caused a lot of issues when I was using local kb layout. Especially problematic are programs that don't support remapping of shortcuts.
> or there was a separate key to move the same space back
And that key was called Backspace.
Same typewriters that didn't bother having dedicated "0" and "1" keys?
Clearly computer have introduced a lot more symbols to the keyboard, but for whatever reason, the em-dash wasn't one of them. Not, at least, as part of the original sets of unmodified and shifted keys. There are more symbols hidden under option and ctrl, but those aren't shown on the keyboard and therefore hard to find and unknown to most people.
> Clearly computer have introduced a lot more symbols to the keyboard, but for whatever reason, the em-dash wasn't one of them
Forms distinguished by width weren’t added to computer keyboards as separate keys because computer keyboards, like typewriters, solidified when computer displays were monospaced. (And, like other forms like proper opening and closing quotes, limited space on the keyboard was a concern.)
computers often insert them for you when you type a normal dash.
I feel like it was Lewis Carroll where I was first exposed to long dashes. I could be misremembering though.
Made me look! 265 in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_.
I use em dashes and semicolons and ellipses and parentheses a lot, although I barely make the leaderboard¹. My doctor says I'm human. In the pre-Unicode era of Usenet and mailing lists I used ‘ -- ’ for a long dash.
¹ https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
So how does that feed into the LLM debate?
I think my last sentence does a pretty good job explaining why most people don't use em-dashes online.
So you think the em dash is a good LLM marker?
in typewriters i think you could easily make longer dashes by concatenating shorter ones.