this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
57 points (95.2% liked)

English usage and grammar

484 readers
1 users here now

A community to discuss and ask questions about English usage and grammar.

If your post refers to a specific English variant, please indicate it within square brackets (for instance [Canadian]).

Online resources:

Sibling communities:

Rules of conduct:

The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon.. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.

(Icon: entry "English" in the Oxford English Dictionary, 1933. Banner: page from Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale".)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ulterno@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago

I only recently learnt about how em-dashes had a separate name, thanks to its popularisation by people trying to detect LLMs.

Earlier, I just thought of them as just a longer dash and I used them when manually writing (often made them longer than 2 characters), but just used a normal dash when typing.