One punctuation mark in particular is having a moment… a not-altogether-welcome one…
Of the many tips and tricks people are coming up with to determine whether a piece of writing has been written with a little help from AI, the world seems to have homed in on the use of one particular punctuation mark: the em dash.
Though some writers have rushed in to defend the dash — the overuse of which sits alongside pizza glue and bluebberrygate in the pantheon of things people laugh at AI about — perhaps a key reason the prevalence of the punctuation mark seems so bot-like to readers is that, as writers, Americans hardly use it.
Indeed, per a recent YouGov survey, dashes are some of the least used pieces of punctuation in Americans’ arsenals, ranking just ahead of colons and semicolons, per the poll.
As you might imagine, the survey revealed that American adults who describe themselves as “good” or “very good” writers are more likely to use the rarer forms of punctuation on the list. However, for the majority of Americans, marks like the semicolon and the em dash remain mostly reserved for esteemed authors and English teachers… or those who aren’t above enlisting a chatbot for a little help to jazz up their communications.
Interestingly, the vast majority of Americans said they do little writing outside of sending texts and emails, with journaling, nonfiction and fiction writing, and other forms of creative or academic writing all falling by the wayside in 2025, according to YouGov’s research…
As we muse on marks, we might that it was on this date in 1956 that Fortran was introduced to the world. A third-generation, compiled, imperative computer programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by an IBM team led by John Backus, it became the go-to language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
In a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, Backus explained Fortran’s origin: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
To the item at the top, it’s worth noting that Fortran is a language with four uses for the dash– subtraction operator, negative sign, line continuation symbol, and range separator (in data processing)– but no em dash.
For a piece of Fortran’s pre-history, see here; and for an important extension, see here.
Poe’s Law – “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”
Cohen’s Law – “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that… …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
Badger’s Law – “any website with the word “Truth” in the URL has none in the posted content.”
Lewis’ Law – “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
Time Cube Law – “As the length of a webpage grows linearly, the likelihood of the author being a lunatic increases exponentially.”
As we go to school on the laws, we might send carefully-composed birthday greetings to Jean Sammet; she was born on this date in 1928. A pioneer in computing, she left a career as a professor of mathematics at the University of Illinois to join IBM, where she developed the computer programming language FORMAC, an extension to FORTRAN IV that was the first commonly used language for manipulating non-numeric algebraic expressions. She also wrote one of the classic histories of programming languages, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals.
Photographer Dominic Episcopo is a man of ecumenical enthusiasms– fashion, reportage and editorial, portraiture… and food. Not content with simple still life, “The United Steaks of America” makes his meat do double duty…
As we proclaim “well done,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that the first test program in FORTRAN ran. FORTRAN (The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) was the first successful general purpose programming language, the first real alternative to assembly language. It reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20, so quickly gained acceptance. It’s still in use, especially in high-performance computing.
Your correspondent is headed to parts distant, where connectivity is likely to be an issue. So these missives won’t resume, at least at anything like their normal rhythm, for a week or so…
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