99% Invisible - The Em Dash

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

The strange history of a punctuation mark that makes writing feel human, and why people now think it proves the opposite. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last summer, despite his better judgment, Brian Vance found himself in the situation that, unfortunately, many of us have been in, an argument with some random person on Reddit. Which is probably not the best thing to do. You know, getting into online fights is not a good use of anyone's time, and it's definitely not good for your blood pressure. Brian is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded some of the internet. something called Stumptown Savings.

That is frequent 99PI contributor, Will Aspinall. Stump Town Savings is a website that covers local grocery deals. Every Thursday, Brian releases a newsletter where he helps his readers find the best food prices in the area. He read me a little snippet. Pantry through August 19th, Equal Exchange, chocolate bar, select varieties 399 each. Annie's organic salad dressing, select varieties two for eight. You can see this is pretty dry. There's not a lot that I can do to make it intriguing to read.

Once again, organic peanut butter, select varieties, $5.99 each. Yeah, I mean, I'm not under the guys that I'm going to win like a Pulitzer Prize in literature for this. In Middenby Faulkner, but Brian takes a lot of pride in his work, including visiting grocery stores in person to find the hottest deals for his readers. Stumptown Savings has become my full-time job. Like, I spend 40 hours a week doing this. Just trying to help people, like, have some say, have some power in what feels like a powerless struggle with, you know, corporate greed and inflation. As you can tell, Brian puts a lot of effort into Stump Town Savings. So he was particularly miffed when a user on Reddit accused him of the ultimate sin using ChatGPT to compose his newsletter.

Brian didn't use AI. but it wasn't just the accusation itself that he found offensive. It was the evidence the Reddit user provided to support his allegation. A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to my use of, quote, extra long m-dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard, end quote. So anyone who uses an MDash must be using AI, and that's just not the case. The reason why this Redditor believed Brian was using AI was because he chose to use an MDAS. The m-dash, if you're not familiar, is a form of punctuation that looks like a horizontal bar in a sentence.

It gets its name from its size, which is about the width of a capital M. Not to be confused with the hyphen or its persnickety cousin, the n-dash, m-dashes are incredibly versatile, because they can replace commas, colon, semicolens, and parentheses. It's an odd thing to be a fan of an M-Dash, but I am a fan of it. It's a fun piece of punctuation. There's a group of people who understand it and appreciate it and really value its flexibility. Today, there are many diehard fans of the M-Dash, but humans aren't the only ones who have taken to using the mark. Recently, large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have been sprinkling M's in their responses like digital confetti.

There are some people who look at it and be like, well, an AI must have did this, because why would a human, use an M-Dash, but, you know, that's, I'm a human. I can confirm I'm a human. Today, we're reclaiming the M-Dash for Brian and other humans, because this plucky bit of punctuation has had a very, very long literary history way beyond today's tussles with technology. It's been on a hero's journey, playing the lead in an adventure story that has spanned both centuries and the pages of our most beloved plays, novels and poems. So, who invented it? And why? The MDASH's origins can be found in trying to find an elegant answer to a very old problem. The problem that existed was that there wasn't really a good set of rules for punctuating

texts. There wasn't really any kind of convention that persisted for all that long, or that was usable across lots of different contexts. This is Keith Houston, author of the book Shady Characters, The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks. He says that while punctuation crept into writing systems around the 3rd century BCE, the rules that governed them remained both complex and inconsistent well into the 11th and 12th centuries.

It was around that time, an Italian scholar decided to leave his mark on the world of punctuation. His name was Bon Campano de Signia. But we're mercifully going to call him Bonnie. He practiced something called Ars Dick Diminis, which was the formal art of composing letters and official documents. The problem was that he found the then system of punctuation not up to snuff for his letter writing.

So he came up with his own. And so when you had someone like Bonnie deciding to write a guide to letter writing, it was kind of up to him to decide how to punctuate things. And for whatever reason, he chose this very simple system. Bonnie created two punctuation marks. One he called Vergula Sersum erecta, which looked like a forward slash. That one indicated a pause in a sentence. The forward slash was eventually shortened and dropped to the bottom of the line,

transforming it into the comma we all recognize today. It remains his greatest contrast. to punctuation, and if you're fluent in Italian, which I am not, you will know that Vogola means comma, and in French, it's Vigul. He also created a second mark called Virgula Plana, which was a horizontal dash that ended the sentence, like a period. And that is like a flat dash or a horizontal dash that looks exactly like a modern N or M dash.

But using a dash at the end of a sentence did not catch on. And for several centuries, it was difficult to find consistent uses of the dash. Possibly, because the dash was not widely adopted, its grammatical role remained slightly unclear and therefore malleable. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to look at the marks around it. So the full stop or period, the question mark, the comma, the colon, the semicolon. And to a certain extent, they were all not fixed, but in slightly more common use, whereas the dash seemed to have, you know, It slid into this new era of printing without necessarily a big weight of opinion behind it. So perhaps it seemed more flexible.

There was freedom to experiment in its use, which is exactly what happened when it got mixed up in the theatrical milieu of 16th and 17th century Elizabethan England. No, you unnatural haggs! I will have such revenges on you both and all the world children. I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. There's a technique in theatre called Aposio Pesis,

which is an ancient Greek term for speech that is deliberately broken off mid-sentence. Use sparingly, it can add dramatic effect to dialogue. Sort of like... This. Playwrights use the dash in writing to indicate thinking pauses, interruptions, mid-speech realisations, or changes of subject for their actors. One rather famous playwright was quite fond of it.

Shakespeare's first folio is a really good example where people are cut off when they lose their train of thought. It uses quite a lot of dashes. I think because it gives a bit of flexibility, it gets a bit more expressiveness than full stops and commas and colons and so on. Are they informed of this, my breath and blood fiery, The fiery Duke, tell the hot Duke that, no, but not yet, maybe he is not well. King Lear, as performed by Sir John Gilgird in 1994, a character facing the demons of old age,

bad decisions, and ungrateful children. In other words, someone who might get lost in his thoughts more than most. Using Dashes to show Apacio Pieces has remained a staple of stage writing, But around 100 years after Shakespeare in the early 18th century, an emerging branch of the literary arts elevated it from mere stage direction to a featured performer. Yeah, so I guess if playwrights had used the dash to imply how a speaker was performing these words, I suppose, for novelists, it was also used to indicate how someone, the cadence of how someone was speaking, to try and bring that to life a little bit. The novel as a literary form was, well, novel.

It was a brand new form of writing, with stylistic conventions that broke away from classical rules of literature. Writers at the time explored authentic fictional characters with complex inner thoughts and naturalistic ways of speaking. And the M-Dash was how early novelists attempted to capture that. The dash became a really handy device to create the sense of someone almost dictating their adventures onto the page. Nowhere is this more obvious than a rambling satirical novel called Tristram Shandy, written by Lawrence Stern in 1759. With us, you see, the case is quite different. We are all ups and downs in this matter. Dash.

You are a great genius. Dash. Or tis fifty to one, sir, that you are a great dunce and a blockhead. Dash. Not that there is a total want of intimate. immediate steps? Dash? No.

Dash? We're not so irregular as that comes to. Dash. But the two extremes are more common and in a greater degree in this unsettled island. This short excerpt has seven dashes in it, and it's used in every which way. In its wayward, dash-drew madness, it feels like Tristram Shandy is a fully rounded and totally flawed human being. there had been nothing like it before in English literature.

You know, someone like Stern when he's writing Tristram Shandy, he's jumping in and out of thoughts. He's trying to commit this almost stream of consciousness narrative to paper. And it feels like it could have been written yesterday. I don't know what it is. There's something about the kind of the verve, the kind of the gusto behind it. It must have been like a bolt from it.

the blue. It must have been so incredible for people at the time to read this. But novelists didn't stop there. Another way they used the dash to convey the illusion of reality was by using the dash to censor sensitive content. It wasn't just for the sort of the sake of pruriance. It was also to give a sense of authenticity, I think, to sort of titillate readers a little bit. In a world dominated by nonfiction, these early writers were using every trick in the book to be taken seriously and make their make-believe stories feel believable. One of the ways they did this was by writing as if the fictional narrative actually took place. Novels were commonly written in the first person as if they were letters, diary entries,

or memoirs to create a sense that it was a real account. Oftentimes names, locations, and dates were censored by dashes, sometimes to protect the identity of a real person. but more often to act as if they were protecting the identity of a real person, adding the spice of factualness to an otherwise fictional story. So you might see someone's name, you might see the first letter of their name followed by a few dashes. One writer who used the dash in this way was Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, the arrival of the handsome Wickham

causes a stir in the fictional town of Merriton. But Wickham is not all that he's... scenes. And when his character is introduced, Austin uses dashes to redact the letters in the name of the army regiment he is about to join, as if that information was scrubbed from the record. Yes, she doesn't want to impugn the reputation of his military regiment, I think, is what she's trying to get across. And again, it's in the service of, I guess, of dramatic realism or the perception of realism here. I couldn't possibly say that thing. These are honourable. and apart from Wickham, who isn't.

The added delight for consumers of these novels was working out the hidden meaning behind the saucy little dash, a tantalizing mystery that promised to be revealed with a careful read. So as well as adding realism to a story, the dash as a censoring device was a clever piece of marketing,

helping sell these shiny new works of fiction to an increasingly literate population. And M-Dash use only exploded from there. According to 1-2018, academic study, dash usage in the English language rose sharply in the 19th century. If there was a golden age for the dash, this was it. Charles Dickens was relatively stingy. Oliver Twist has 703 dashes or one dash every 224 words. Herman Melville was undoubtedly a fan. Moby Dick clocks in with one dash every 129 words.

And Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. piece, one dash every 90. A lot of this widespread adoption caught on because of how versatile the M-Dash can be. At this very core, the M-Dash signifies a visual pause on the page. And so in that way, it could easily stand in for other grammatical pauses, like the comma or colon or semicolon, except, you know, a little more fun. It's such a useful thing. It allows you to do a kind of a U-turn within a sentence.

I've heard it describe this being useful for special effects. when you want to introduce a real change in tone or sentiment or direction, or when you want to set up a punchline, for example. But importantly, the MDASH was a punctuation mark that could make a sentence feel more human. In real life, we are naturally changing thoughts, cutting off others or cutting off ourselves. And one American poet would come to be defined by this punctuation mark more than any other, using them not for the way we talk, but to fathom the workings of a human mind. Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye, much sense the starkest madness.

Tis the majority in this as all prevails. Ascent and you are saying, Dimmer, you're straightway dangerous and handled with a chain. That is the dash-laden poetry of Emily Dickinson, as read by my former English professor. at Cambridge. So my name's Fiona Green. I'm a fellow at Jesus College and a lecturer at the English faculty and I've been here for about 30 years,

if you can believe it. And I've done a lot of work on Dickinson and she's one of my favourite poets. How we doing? Perfect. Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts, many of them composed during the Civil War.

She put into verse the challenges of life, death and everything in between accompanied by thousands of dashes. Some of them are very easy and straightforward and have obviously obvious reference, but some of them don't make any sense. And some of them seem to represent a mind that's absolutely at odds with itself.

So sometimes they come midline, they just come like a parenthetical dash with one word in between two lines. It's a void where we can pour in our... ideas? That makes it sound really sloppy, and I don't think she's a sloppy thinker. I think that she's a quick, quick thinker. Dickinson used dashes to quickly move on to the next thought, caring less about completion than pinning down her unique insights of the human experience onto paper. She exploited unfinishedness, right? And that the poems are always in the

process, always undecided and always in the process of making and kind of never finished. And in that story, the dash and that suspendedness, that suspendedness of decision over punctuation is part of the unfinishedness of the poem. It's not clear to me that she was writing something primarily, if at all, for publication. Dickinson never gave a reason for using dashes instead of other punctuation marks, leading to decades of academic inquiry and speculation. It feels as though she used the flexibility of the dash to introduce even more ambiguity to a poem's meaning.

So there's a very famous poem called Publication is the auction of the mind of man. Can you read it? So publication is the auction of the mind of man, poverty be justifying for so foul a thing, possibly. But we would rather, from our Garrett go, white unto the white creator than invest our snow. I mean, I noticed when you read it, you kind of, you did run over a few dashes.

Well, but listen, how would you read it? Read it with the dashes, read the dashes out loud. How do they sound? Well, publication is the auction of the mind of man. Poverty, be justifying for so foul a thing. So you're assuming that a dashes, is a pause. And yet we've also said that a dash is a way of moving quickly. And what is actually overriding any kind of punctuation is the metre. We know how it goes. Publication is the

auction of the mind of man. Poverty be justifying for so foul a thing. So the metrical frame overrides any kind of punctuation, particularly when it's this very familiar ballad form. So the dash is to be seen and read? Yeah. You can't hear the dashes. mind-blown. That's so often 25 years ago. When Emily Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of 55, her handwritten poems were edited and published by Mabel Lewis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. They gave the poem's titles, capitalized words, and crucially removed most of her dashes. Look, I know I am reducing her mind-altering verse to a set of statistics, but I've counted all the dashes left out in the first collection of poems

Todd and Higginson published in 1890. Out of the 1,151 dashes, they kept just 52 of them. That's a big, big change to how the poems look on the page, even if, as Fiona says, it didn't change how they were read out. I think they put her into circulation in a way that was legible to a 19th century audience. Yes, so it looks to us like a hatchet job, but it looks to that readership in the 1890s as something familiar, something they can read.

It's avant-garde, it's strange, it's unusual. And it doesn't feel like 19th century thinking in lots of ways. Her first posthumous collection was a sensation, and her poems have never gone out of print. But it was not the first time in English literary history, grammar purists felt that the dash count was too high for the times. Ever since the M-Dash became a widely adopted punctuation mark, it is faced backlash. A century before Dickinson, Jonathan Swift, mocked excessive use of the dash by contemporary writers

in a long satirical poem. In modern wit, all printed trash is set off with numerous breaks and dashes. Almost a century later, an anonymous reviewer for the British critic said this about a poem by Lord Byron. We must protest against the effect of dashes, which occur without any reason whatsoever, sometimes twice or thrice in one line and nevertheless than a dozen times in a page. And while Jane Austen's dashes may have titillated her readers, with her editors, it was a different story. Recently, a writer and comedian named Cressy Cornus spent two years studying the dashes in Jane Austen's published and unpublished works, and she estimates that over 6,000 M dashes were edited out from prize.

in prejudice. It's easy to overuse the dash. Keith Houston again. It's a really useful mark. I have to do it myself. I mean, I know Jane Austen but I do have to self-edit to stop myself using it all the time.

Even today, modern guardians of grammar like the Chicago Manual of Style warn writers like Keith against dash overusage with the catchy rhyme, if in doubt, edit them out. Even Fiona Green, my professor and Emily Dickinson Maven, believes that as versatile as it is, other more targeted punctuation

can be necessary for clarity. I was thinking of certain prose writers, I better not say, who I think use the dash so as to sound lyrical and ought to be more decisive about what they're saying. It's kind of multipurpose, but it's also a way of not making decisions. I would say, well, what exactly is the connection between this thought and that thought? I need to know if it's a semicolon or a comma because then there's a different thought being expressed and a different articulation,

which means a joining together of thoughts. As far as punctuation is concerned, the MDASH could be a bit divisive, and for centuries, critics, editors, technical writers, and authors of various op-eds have opined over whether it's a mark of lazy grammar. But divisive or not, that never stopped Great Reworthy. writers like Henry James, Jack Kerouac, or Brian Vance from Stump Town Savings from using it in spades.

You know, let me read one of those entries again. So safe catch elite wild can tuna, comma, select varieties, M-Dash, 2 for 6. And I'm doing that deliberately because I'm trying to really call out the pricing separate from the item to like make that stand out. Clearly, Brian is and always will be a fan of the M-Dash, which is why he was dismayed in. 2025 when the MDASH got dragged into the debate about whether it's a clear signal that the text was written by AI. A lot of what I had been seeing over the past six months, really, is that, you know, the MDash is a dead giveaway that someone's using chat GBT.

But some people see an M dash probably for, you know, the hundredth time this week, and they instantly assume chat GPT wrote that. People around the internet started to notice that many people around the internet started to notice that Many large language models like chat GPT have the tendency to deploy the end dash with reckless abandon. It was to the point that some, well, younger generations who might be more attuned to reading emails and text messages, began referring to it as something else. Chat GPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at the moment, okay? Pretty little thing recently had a rebrand.

The top most light comment was someone being like, I can't believe they let chat chach chviness. It's a longer hyphen. I don't know if you've noticed it. that we've been given and yeah, everyone should take it. Public service announcement, take out the hyphen. This mark that was so heavily relied upon by the likes of Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson is now being referred to as the chat GPT hyphen. That is how much people are connecting it

with artificial intelligence. So how is it that a punctuation mark used for hundreds of years to make writing feel more human became a capture for machine-generated text? When Theo Vaughn asked Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, about this on his podcast, Altman claimed he added the dashes for lulls. Why does Chad UbT have that hyphen thing? You know, we have this team that figures out what the model's personality should be like and how it should behave.

And a lot of users like m-dashes. So we had more m-dashes. And now I think we have too many m-dashes. But that's the answer. It was just like, users liked it. We put more in. Now it's like a little bit of a meme. and it's quite annoying to me. We should fix that.

It's not entirely clear whether Altman's telling us the whole story, and industry insiders like Sean Geddica believe it's much more complicated than that. It's surprisingly hard to find the answer. There's not the kind of consensus on the topic that you would expect for something so observable. Certainly all of the closed models, i.e. all of the best models, or the process of training them is a trade secret. Sean says that this is a pretty recent phenomenon, and that chat GPT hasn't always used a lot of MDashes in its writing.

So GPT 3.5 came out in November 2022 and didn't use a lot of MDashes. Around that time, OpenAI's language model had mostly been trained on publicly available data around the web, things like websites, articles, blogs, pirated books, around 600,000 Enron emails, probably not a ton of m-dashes used in those Enron emails. And then July 2024, by that time, the models were producing a lot of m-dashes. So there's this kind of, you know, just under two-year window. Chat GPT users all began to notice not just that m-dashes were frequently used, but that the LLM wouldn't stop using it.

Numerous open AI and Reddit threads from frustrated users claim that no matter how much they prompted to avoid m-dashes, the AI would insert them back in. Sean wondered what was going on in that time frame that led to the emergence of the MDASH, and in June 2025 he got the clue he needed. Anthropic, the company behind the LLM Claude and one of OpenAI's main competitors, were forced to reveal their methods in a lawsuit. These companies began to search for more data,

and in particular they searched for print books, print books from older decades that perhaps weren't as represented in the printoutes, in the previous training data. Court documents have shown that Anthropic aimed to expand the language model not just by feeding an information that was publicly available on the web, but quite literally, all the books in the world.

In a process called destructive scanning, Anthropic bought millions of books, cut the pages out of their bindings, and digitize them to feed Claude. Sean suspects the model's ravenous appetite for words most likely included all of the great authors of our time, M-Dashes and all. Again, this is pure speculation on my book.

They kind of picked up the stylistic habits of these like classic literature texts, which seem very incongruous when people use them today to write emails and job applications and that kind of thing. So if you were to train language models on a bunch of late 1800s, early 1900s English, they might end up using M-Dashers as much as those books do, which today would seem like overuse. And with that, the dash has now passed. from the hand of Shakespeare into the vast data centers of this new age. It is, of course, reductive to assume any bit of writing that contains an MDash was written by AI.

In fact, the reason why LLM's add MDash is to generate a text is because it's a mark that we have used for literally hundreds of years in published writing. At least for now, there's still subtle hints that a piece of writing has been composed using AI, a formal tone, specific vocabulary words, a certain kind of beigeness to the writing itself. But there is something about that long, elegant dash on a page that makes it easy to pick out and pick on. It's an easy mark. The M-Dash may have gotten unfairly caught up in the bigger existential dread around AI. It goes without saying, though, that there are bigger issues at stake than ruminating over a piece of punctuation, and not everyone has lost their focus or their minds.

Does punctuation really make people angry? I mean, there are so many things in the world to make you angry. As an educator, it's not necessarily spotting the difference between real and fake that gets Dr Fiona Green's blood boiling. What concerns her is that people don't seem to understand what they are surrendering when they allow AI to do the hard parts for them, that the hard parts are precisely what it is. it's all about.

The thought that you can save time, the machine will do it more quickly. What are you trying to get to? Everything that you read can matter. Every rabbit hole that you accidentally go down matters, misreading things and reading something boring and stopping halfway through and so on and so on. All of that is part of the study.

You see these lights go on all the time, right? You went like this earlier, you know, mind blow. It changes the way people think. it rewires their brain. So why would we introduce a machine? Why would we outsource exactly that perfect moment to something else? It's the process of learning that then sends you out as a different human. In November of 2025, Sam Altman announced the news to M-Dash haters and lovers around the world.

Quote, small but happy when? If you tell chat GPT not to use M-Dash. in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. Perhaps with this update, some AI users will abandon dashes entirely, which I cannot say I am too cut up about. After all these years and after countless adventures together, the MDash belongs back with us humans. What's your favourite poem?

I do have a favourite. It starts, I felt a cleaving in my mind. You know that one? I don't. I asked Viona if she'd send us out with her favourite poem by Emily M-Dickinson. And in the unsure, maddening future we are heading towards, the choice felt appropriate. I felt a cleaving in my mind as if my brain had split. I tried to match it seam by seam but could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join unto the thought before, but sequence ravelled out of sound like balls upon the floor. Isn't that wild? Coming up, Will tells us me about one weapon in the battle against AI writing. Typography. Stay with us. So we're back with Will Aspinall. And in the main story, you talked about how the MDASH got caught up in the sort of existential dread that comes along with AI.

And there's been kind of this stigma associated with using the MDash, how it's the sort of like this smoke. smoking gun that if you see an M-Dash, it means that this thing was written by AI. And it's gotten to the point where people actively avoid using the punctuation because they're trying to avoid the accusation of using AI for their writing. But you're here because you want to talk about this really inventive design-led solution that's a more positive spin on this whole situation. Yeah, exactly. So instead of obsessively monitoring your M-Dash usage and taking steps to exterminate them, or, you know, perhaps like me, thumb your nose at the grammar place and actually up M-Dash use exponentially.

A creative agency based in Sydney, Australia, called Cocoa Gun, has opted for another approach, a redesign of the M-Dash called the Am-Dash. Okay, so what is the Am-Dash exactly? So the Am-Dash is a new punctuation mark that you would use exactly like an M-Dash, for pauses, commas, as a colon, or just for some dramatic flare. But it looks a little different. So here's a picture. Can you see that, Roman?

Yes. So this is like the M-Dash, it's this long bar. But, you know, at the left end, it kind of curves down and the right end it curves up. It's kind of like an M-Dash with seraphs on it, sort of like a tilde. Exactly, yeah. And my initial reaction was it looks like one of those kind of suave 20s-style pencil moustaches. So the idea is that you put one or more of these babies in your writing instead of an M-Dash, and you'll never be confused for a machine or be accused. of using one, because it's its very scarcity is that what makes it AI proof. Because language models go on probability, the likelihood of chat GPT using an Amdash instead of an M is infinitesimally small. Is there a way of making a statement? Is it a bit of a, I don't mean a human fight back in a kind of like, yeah, let's man the fences and kind of tear down the hour river and all that kind of thing. But just to make a pointed comment on where we are in culture with this thing.

That's Aunt Melda, the co-founder of Coca-Gun in Sydney. He said that the Amdash came about in trying to find the appropriate response to the rise of AI writing. We wanted it to be rooted in a real love of writing. It just kind of really sucks that people would outsource all writing to a machine, to an algorithm. Okay, so if I'm understanding this correctly, using an Am-Dash instead of an Am-Dash, It's kind of this symbolic way to signal that the text that I am writing has been typed up by me, a human, because an LLM wouldn't ever think to insert an AmDash. That's right. That's right.

So how does one even use an AmDash? Like, I didn't know, I didn't know such a thing existed. Like, how do you actually insert it into whatever word processor you're using? Okay. So, yeah, to get it requires downloading two fonts developed by Coca-Gun. They're called Times New Human, which is the serif option, and A-Real, which is the, the songs. Okay. They're doing a whole thing here. Okay. Yeah, there's a lot of puns in this. There's a lot of puns, which I love. I love a good pun. And then to use it, you simply type Am and

hyphen, and it'll insert that little moustache dash into your work. So to replace the M dash with the Am takes a very human type commitment. And that is one of the reasons I really, really like this idea. It's the sheer eccentric humanity of this project. it's, okay, it's really, really low stakes. But the response has surprised Ant with thousands of downloads since its release in May 2025. We didn't really think we'd get that many downloads. We thought there'd be maybe a couple of hundred and that'd be it.

And the more it's used, every time someone uses it, that's kind of an example of, you know, that's another flag in the sand, I guess. So the real challenge for the Amdash is getting accepted by Unicode and being one of almost 160,000 characters in the current book. and Ant said that seeing the Amdash appear in the wild would really be a crowning achievement. If there was an article in the New York Times,

like a headline in the New York Times, it would use the Amdash, that would be just, you know, dream come true. I'm helping out, Anne, because I showed it to Brian Vance of Stumptown Savings fame, and he was very taken with it. So, you know, who knows? If you're in the Portland, Oregon area,

you might get to see the Amdash being used to highlight the low, low price of tuna. And that would be a really neat end to the all deal Brian's been through. But, you know, this brings to mind an issue, which is as it gets used out in the wild, then it does get picked up by LLMs, and then it would be regurgitated by, you know, some kind of AI composer. I mean, I would say there's a huge imbalance. This is a David and Goliath story, right?

You know, currently the M dash is everywhere and a few little am dashes. I mean, you know, we might be very old men by the time that happens. I see. I see. So we can win these, you know, like battles right now and worry about the overall war later. That's it. The moment is now. Well, this is great.

Thank you so much for this story about the Amdash and its predecessor of the Amdash. This has been such a fun episode to make. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Roman. If you want to start using it, go to theamdash.com where there are links to downloading Times New Human. and a reel. Nice.

99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall and edited by Vivian Lay, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hesha, who did unfortunately need to hand-count the number of M-Dashes in Emily Dickinson's work for this story.

I'm so sorry about that, Graham. Special thanks this week to Sam Byrne, who performed the readings of our literary characters, and to Grant Hutchinson for his illuminating page on the M-Dash on his website. OikaFuge.com. Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Perrube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lachamadon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, talent and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Series XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building. in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. For the record, this episode contained 68 m-dashes, which I believe earns us a three on the Dickinson M-dash scale.