The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
the — is another victim the chat bots. i’m reading a grammar obsessed writer rn and he uses them in all sorts of ways — quite liberally as well
yo fuck the em dash all my homies hate the em dash ——— i didn’t know that shit even existed until ChudGPT zombies shit them onto my screen, back in my day you only had access to two dashes on your dang keyboard, _ or -, and if you wanted your - to be longer you would just press the damn thing a few more times like this — and shit you’d mostly just use them to make dancing kirby emoticons in AOL chat <(-‘.’<) <(-‘.’-)> (>‘.’-)>
i never bother to look up how ppl made the special characters so the kirbys were always my fav (_)
some “smart” text editors would automatically emdash if you did --, like how microsoft word would … into a marginally smaller actual unicode ellipses character
The compose key has been around for ages