[nopardons]

WHAT THE BLEEDING HELL??????????????

I was an English major in college and NEVER heard of using - for ANY kind of punctuation....NOT EVER! Okay, I'm on the older side of things, but since WHEN has - been used instead of:, ; (), etc.? And I've NEVER seen it used anywhere; but then, I do NOT use/come in contact with stupid AI crap.

[DoodleBob]

Friend, you encountered a lot of that AI crap on FR.

A lot of the articles are brought to you by AI.

[gundog]

You’ve never heard of La-a. (A girl’s name, pronounced Ladasha. The dash don’t be silent.)

[Lockbox]

- - - - - - 😂

[Bob434]

I use it all the time- maybe not always the double — but the single - at .east. bot even sure where i learned about it but have zlways used it. But then again, ,im not exzctly a lit major or anything, zmd my writing is sloppy a d amateurish

[T Ruth]

From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

“Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn’t it?”
“Yes’m.”
“Powerful warm, warn’t it?”
“Yes’m.”
“Didn’t you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?”
A sort of shudder passed through Tom—a feeling of lonesomeness and homesickness was creeping over him—but he gave no sign.

[Dr. Sivana]

but since WHEN has - been used instead of:, ; (), etc.?

My Warriner's taught me that a dash ("--" on an old typewriter, NOT a hyphen) was used when a contrast or comparison was being made. It is a thing, and widely used in newspapers even in the 1970s, but more commonly used since everyone has access to real typographical characters.

The semi-colon has all but disappeared, and it is very rare that business correspondence begins with a proper colon, rather than the informal comma ("Dear Mr. Smith:" rather than "Dear Mr. Smith,").

[cgbg]

I use lots of dashes around here—but I guess it could be...—but how would I know?

Lol.

[alexander_busek]

I was an English major in college and NEVER heard of using - for ANY kind of punctuation

Please don't embarrass yourself any further; the em dash is a legitimate punctuation mark.

Maybe just say that you were sick on the day that was discussed.

Regards,

[rarestia]

I was an English major in college and NEVER heard of using - for ANY kind of punctuation....NOT EVER!

Same. I have a graduate degree in English, and our professors would gratuitously mark up our papers if we used dashes or emdashes. They were "lazy punctuation" according to two of them. If you don't know how to effectively use commas and semicolons, you're missing out on basic sentence structure.

[A_perfect_lady]

Older writing uses it a lot. Fiction from the 1700s and 1800s, for instance. There's over 450 of them in Pride and Prejudice alone:

“Oh, you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be sure that did seem as if he admired her—indeed, I rather believe he did—I heard something about it—but I hardly know what—something about Mr. Robinson.”

[gloryblaze]

I was taught in English class that a dash is to be used when nothing else is perfectly fitting. I use one quite a bit.

[fuzzylogic]

I do find that I use it a lot. That said, you can actually ask ChatGPT to ‘write at an 8-grade level’, it will comply!