{"id":18697,"date":"2025-12-11T12:34:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T20:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=18697"},"modified":"2025-12-11T12:34:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T20:34:13","slug":"em-dash-appreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2025\/12\/11\/em-dash-appreciation\/","title":{"rendered":"Em Dash Appreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I hereby announce the formation of the Em Dash Appreciation Society (for Humans)<\/a>, also known as EmDASH.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019ve written a bit about em dashes here before\u2014in column hhh<\/a> (1999) and column UUU<\/a> (2000)\u2014but haven\u2019t mentioned here that some people have recently been claiming that use of em dashes is a sign of generative AI.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\r\n

I was originally going to call the organization the Society for the Protection of the Em Dash, or SPED. But Protection<\/i> didn\u2019t quite capture the tone I was looking for, nor did Promotion<\/i> (going for the same acronym)\u2014and anyway, the word SPED<\/i> didn\u2019t have anything to do with em dashes.<\/p>\r\n

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\u2019t ask for people to provide their email addresses or money.<\/p>\r\n

Finally, I realized that I had been inspired by Erin McKean\u2019s Semicolon Appreciation Society<\/a>, and that really what I wanted to do with regard to em dashes was appreciate<\/i> them. So that led me to the name EDAS<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n

And then I realized that adding the lowercase m<\/i> gave EmDAS<\/i>, and all I needed was an H<\/i> word to round out the acronym.<\/p>\r\n

That stumped me for a while. Should the name be Em Dash Appreciation Sans Hiatus<\/i>? (Or Sans Hubris<\/i>?) Should I attach it to a place name that begins with H<\/i>?<\/p>\r\n

Then Humans<\/i> occurred to me. I hate to be discriminatory; I wouldn\u2019t want to exclude any nonhumans who appreciate em dashes. So maybe someday I\u2019ll change the name of the Society. But for now, for Humans<\/i> seemed appropriate.<\/p>\r\n

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.<\/p>\r\n

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!<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punctuation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18697"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18698,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18697\/revisions\/18698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}