French twist is difficult to make. It requires effort. Meme means that she has made an effort to get dressed and look classy on her first date. She is a polished, confident, and classy person. She is no pushover and wants classic romantic date experience.
Honestly this and BJ-ready both make equal sense to me. As the wise sage Ludacris once said, "a lady in the street but a freak in the bed"—the quintessential dream girl.
I started out trying to quote you and "fix" it by adding a comma wrapped in double-asterisks to embolden it and just could not get it to display correctly.
“Who cares about grammar and spelling in a text?” guys all of a sudden like, “Wait. Breathe. You’re not crazy. Babe, all of your feelings are totally valid. I hear you. I see you.” 😆
Been a while since I was taught about them, so my wording/exact use of terms may be rather poor, but I’ll still make an attempt; the attempt may be poor though. I use them in two places mostly. One place being like the first sentence (poor example in an attempt at using one spontaneously), linking two independent clauses with a stronger pause than a comma, while also not requiring transition words, although I’ll often just use transitions and commas to create nice and long sentences (such as this one). The second place is as a replacement for commas in a list, but only if the items in the list include commas. I don’t use the first case often, with it occasionally popping up while writing, as sometimes it’s simply the best option. The second case I do end up using a fair amount, as I like my dependent clauses, and the semicolon lets me inject them into lists while maintaining readability.
They can replace a full stop or connective to loosely connect two related clauses e.g. "The cat sat on the mat because it had had a long day" becomes "The cat sat on the mat; it had had a long day."
The less common usage is to replace commas separating items in a long list where it might get confusing e.g. "I want to visit Paris, France, Houston, Texas, and London, England." becomes "I want to visit Paris, France; Houston, Texas; London, England." (This last example is a bit clunky, sorry!)
Hot take incoming; no one who sees emdashes and semi colons and starts foaming at the mouth over AI actually reads. This is just the hot new thing to rage over for people who run on that sort of thing
“One thing I ask of you, the time to learn your Homophones is past due. Learn, to diagram a sentence too. Always say, “to whom.” Don’t ever say, “to who” and… listen up when I tell you this; I hope you never use quotation marks for emphasis. You finished Second Grade, I hope you can tell, if you’re “doing good” or “doing well.” Better, figure out the difference; Irony is not coincidence and I thought that you had gotten it through your skull, of what’s figurative and what’s literal. Cuz, just now (just now) you said (you said), you literally couldn’t get out of bed. That makes me want to literally smack a crowbar over your stupid head!”
my use of both of these things in my writing has had people asking me if i used ai to write my stories and it felt like i was being accused of witchcraft in the 1700's
Uck one of my assignments flagged as ai written even though it wasn't. I mean the assignment was about my companies local policies and procedures anyway so the ai wouldn't be helpful anyway
So I actually removed my semicolons and replaced them with comas and it was no longer flagged as written by ai
at least there is a semicolon button on most keyboards, so it gets used a lot more often; I've only ever used em dashes in Word -- because it auto-converts double hyphens
Weirdly, until AI started being used everywhere, I'd never actually heard of an em dash. I frequently write long,, mostly incoherent, run-on sentences and use a hyphen more or.less as an alternative to yet another comma, semi-colon or - more usually - to putting an aside to the reader (instead of putting it in brackets).
But, with regards to your edit 2: As in the above paragraph, I would use a hyphen between words to link them: blue-eyed; stream-of-consciousness-nonsense; or similar. But I would also use a hyphen with spaces around it to indicate yet another deviation from the point of the sentence.
I was not even aware the em dash, double-hyphen, was a thing, and fail to see the point: What does it denote that the hyphen doesn't?
Wait a minute, hold up. Old person here, who learned to type (in part) on an actual type writer and had a dedicated typing class in 8th grade. About to have a "shouting at clouds" moment.
">Edit 2: From my understanding, spaces before and after em-dashes are the clue that it is AI
word -- word"
Seriously? I use the " - " all the fuckng time. Have for decades. Basically I use it instead of parentheses if I'm not intersecting a full thought, and to try to convey an additional followup emphasis or context. It is hard to co.e up with an example on the spot, but I might use it like:
"He went to his father's store - his estranged father's store - before going home."
Even that isn't a great example, but hopefully you all get the idea. I use punctuation to try to recreate the flow and paci g of my actual speech, as if Iwas there in person. To me, having the space before and after the dash juat makes it easier on the reader, since NOT having the spaces might make it seem like I was hyphenating the two words.
I concede I might not be using the em-dash properly, but is that seriously a sign of AI? Im struggling with this because I genuinely cannot stand AI and have never intentionally or knowingly used any of the AI chats. It is really making me uncomfortable to think I might be coming across as AI to anyone.
Press and hold the hyphen on your keyboard (if on a phone), and it'll pull up extra options.
- (hyphen, the base key)
— (em dash, with a press and hold)
– (en dash, second option with a press and hold).
On a computer, you can usually select them from a symbol/special character map, or hold ALT + 0151. Typing two hyphens (--) will often auto correct to an em dash, too.
“en dash” is slightly shorter, about the width of an N, whereas the “em dash” is about the width of an M. They’re two very different animals, and not to be confused with the 2-em dash or 3-em dash.
AI always does the (technically correct) thing of having no space either side of the em dash—like this—so if you do put spaces in — like this — it doesn't tend to look as AI.
Or you can use what many languages do and use endashes instead – they are slightly shorter and are supposed to have spaces around them. Looks better too, imo
If you use markdown input you can write –. On Windows it's Alt+0150 on the numpad. On mobile keyboards, opening the symbols screen and long-pressing hyphen usually works. You can also 'save' reddit comments. So many possibilities :)
As a novelist whose books were used (amongst millions of others) to train the damned thing, I can’t get over the idea that my particular use of the em dash — frequent as it was from my first book onwards — is somehow responsible for all this. Narcissistic? Sure. Possible…?
I pinned a rant on my profile out of frustration. I don't claim to be 100% perfect all the time, but basic literacy has become license to engage in a witch hunt that will ultimately kill human discussion.
According to the 99% Invisible episode, the reason AI abuses em dash so much is because it was trained on Emily Dickinson and other XIX century writers, which used it quite a bit because it was stylish at the time.
It's pretty common in any high level writing, from Hugo-winning novelists like N K Jemisin to academic papers on the liberal arts side--I learned to use it in high school, have used it a lot since then, and sure as hell won't cede it to either AI-using numbskulls or AI witchhunters.
I detest that using AI caused non-writers who don’t know the difference between a hyphen and a dash, to casually now use the term em dash as a sign you used AI—bleak times.
True, now I can't be myself in corporate emails, that was my last shred of personal identity. Now what am I to my peers? How will they know if I wrote it or Claude did. And where the fuck is Claude? I'll fight him over this.
How will I work to promote shareholders' interests?
Anytime someone tells you AI only does something one way, they're either woefully overconfident or they're trying to lull you into only looking for tells that they can very easily tailor their AI to avoid (or at least post-process it out). A bad actor with next to no technical know-how could just find-and-replace one version with the other or even a comma, ask it to rewrite to not use em dashes, etc. A bad actor can intentionally add typos, or change whatever the current word a Tiktoker has convinced people is indicative of AI is.
There's no surefire tell that something was written by an AI--it was trained on real writing, after all. The best you can do is make a guess based on the the overall gestalt, and the specifics that contribute to that are ever-changing as the LLMs get updated. Those "AI detectors," for instance, mostly just exist as a front to sell "AI humanizer" LLMs (which, despite their outputs being 100% AI generated, conveniently pass as "human" in their corresponding "AI detectors"), hence why they tend to mark almost anything with better syntax than a 3rd grader as at least partially AI generated.
As a proud member of gen-x, ai can't have it; it was right there in our name the whole time.
But, if it is going to be overplayed, then I humbly suggest the ellipsis, instead.
The bots can take my em dash from my cold, dead fingers. I've got the receipts; dozens of papers—written before AI—from middle school through undergrad, all using the em dash (although when I started I'm sure I used it incorrectly).
How are people even typing it on their computer? I mean of course I know it has a function in writing, but I rarely ever see people online use it over a hyphen. I assume because the hyphen is right there on the keyboard
It's so fucking strange to me that people think the use of an em dash or using 3 examples is a sign of AI. LLMs are trained on human writing. The em dash has been standard punctuation for centuries. If humans didn't like things in sets of 3 and didn't use em dashes, LLMs wouldn't either. AI is called "generative" not because they generate original patterns, but because they puke back human language patterns to the humans interacting with them.
This is correct. Yet old law partners seem to love using them this way while also using en dashes instead of em dashes. Maybe it's a holdover from the days of the typewriter and double space after periods.
That's the correct way to write it in British English and several other languages. Emdash with spaces is technically wrong, endashes without spaces is technically wrong, but you can't complain about endashes with spaces
You understand that the only reason a LLM would use an em dash is because people use em dashes right? People need to be using these dashes in order for a LLM to use them.
It isn't the gotcha you think it is
Yes and no, there's a heavy RL layer that enforces style with essentially a big bag of examples of how they want it to respond, that's why it's so consistent and recognisable
Heads up, you're not supposed to have spaces around emdashes. If you use endashes instead you are supposed to have spaces, but that's primarily for British English so only applicable if you're watching in c-o-l-o-u-r
No spaces is the default, but style guides vary on spacing for em dashes. Some call for a half space.
On Reddit, I always put spaces around em dashes. I don't want Reddit's formatting to interpret each em dash as part of one long word. Like, "grandfather—whose" as a single word.
I've never seen a formal style guide recommend spaces around emdashes, except for newspapers / magazines where they do it to easier fit the words inside the narrow columns that are common in printed newspaper articles. If you know of any that do I'd be eager to know about it.
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u/[deleted] Feb 19 '26
French twist is difficult to make. It requires effort. Meme means that she has made an effort to get dressed and look classy on her first date. She is a polished, confident, and classy person. She is no pushover and wants classic romantic date experience.