Em Dash Appreciation
I hereby announce the formation of the Em Dash Appreciation Society (for Humans), also known as EmDASH.
I’ve written a bit about em dashes here before—in column hhh (1999) and column UUU (2000)—but haven’t mentioned here that some people have recently been claiming that use of em dashes is a sign of generative AI.
I’ve recently seen a few social-media posts in support of em dashes, so I decided it was finally time to create the organization that I had been vaguely thinking was needed for a while.
I was originally going to call the organization the Society for the Protection of the Em Dash, or SPED. But Protection didn’t quite capture the tone I was looking for, nor did Promotion (going for the same acronym)—and anyway, the word SPED didn’t have anything to do with em dashes.
I poked around online and found a couple of other organizations with similar stated goals, but I wanted something lighter in tone and something that didn’t ask for people to provide their email addresses or money.
Finally, I realized that I had been inspired by Erin McKean’s Semicolon Appreciation Society, and that really what I wanted to do with regard to em dashes was appreciate them. So that led me to the name EDAS.
And then I realized that adding the lowercase m gave EmDAS, and all I needed was an H word to round out the acronym.
That stumped me for a while. Should the name be Em Dash Appreciation Sans Hiatus? (Or Sans Hubris?) Should I attach it to a place name that begins with H?
Then Humans occurred to me. I hate to be discriminatory; I wouldn’t want to exclude any nonhumans who appreciate em dashes. So maybe someday I’ll change the name of the Society. But for now, for Humans seemed appropriate.
I looked for a good domain name, but unfortunately most of the obvious best ones have been taken, so I went with functional instead of brief.
Then it was just a matter of registering the domain name, setting up WordPress, and writing text for a landing page. And thus was the Society born!