You can’t use an em dash—something that indicates an extra detail or point in an interjectory way (at least this is the normal use)—without anyone thinking that your text came from ChatGPT.

Em dashes, as well as colons and semicolons, are types of punctuation that get weirdly criticized and looked down upon all the time. I don’t understand.

I was having a conversation with my dad and described how a person on a bicycle kamikazed in front of my car and how they were being stupid.

My dad started lecturing me on how that person can't be a they, and I should say "He or she"

He was talking about 3rd person form or something. I dunno. He's not an English teacher or anything and rather dislikes liberal arts.

Is there any historical reference to using they in this manner, separate from any modern gender debates?

Edit: I could not tell if they were a man or woman in this situation which is why I used "they" to begin with. In case that wasn't clear.

Hi -

I just got told off by my family for using the expression “it’s 10 to 9” to mean it is 8:50. I am an American, my wife is Australian, and my kids have grown up predominantly in the US. They all told me the phrase was archaic and uncommon in either country. Am I crazy? I can’t find much about the prevalence of the phrase on the interwebs.

Update: I have been informed that what I say is “10 of 9,” which I guess is a bit more unusual to their ears.

My coworkers and I were talking the other day when one of them asked if anyone had seen a medical show called "The Pitt." I asked about the show’s premise, and everyone burst into laughter. They simply replied, "The premise is a medical show," and looked at me as if I were crazy when I insisted, "The premise as in what is the show about?"

Although English isn’t my native language, I’ve been living in America since I was a child, and I must admit that this experience made me feel a bit stupid. To my understanding, the "premise" of a show implies its storyline—the driving force that draws people to watch it—rather than merely categorizing it as a "medical show." Am I using the word "premise" incorrectly?

Edit 2 (5 years later): There's now a subreddit dedicated specifically to this topic: r/whennotwhenever :-)

Original Post: I don't know how to find hard data on this, but my subjective observation is that more and more people are using "whenever" when they really mean "when." For example, someone might say, "whenever I got my driver's license, I drove a manual." This implies that they had to get their driver's license multiple times or that they aren't sure when it happened. I'm pretty happy to allow language to change and not sweat the pedantic details, as long as the meaning is clear. This is an example of an error that often results in ambiguous meaning or potential confusion.

While I find it jarring and annoying, I'm more interested in whether or not this construction is becoming more prevalent, how old it is, and where/how it emerged. I've actually brought it up with people who have used it incorrectly, and I've always been greeted with blank stares. These were highly educated, avid readers, mind you - and they seem to be oblivious to their use of a longer word when the shorter option is more grammatically correct. What is going on, here?

Edit 1: I posted this question almost 4 years ago, and I'm getting new comments on here more and more often. This linguistic phenomenon used to be confined to specific regions and subcultures (Scots-Irish in origin). I still don't know of any information about its spread in the past decade, which seems to be accelerating. I remain baffled by it, because it's less efficient than the standard usage and often causes real confusion about the speaker's meaning.

I’m not from an English speaking country. Therefore I have always wondered how this word works. Apparently it is used as a name but also a word for something most men have? Doesn’t this get confusing, and wouldn’t a person named dick also be hating his life?

When I was using a PC with Microsoft Word in the 1990s, I learned the typographical shortcuts for many symbols not on the keyboard. I still remember Alt + 0150 produced an en dash and Alt + 0151 produced the em dash. I wasn’t a writer but I worked for one.

Later in the 2000s I studied typography as a graphic designer and learned more about glyphs and “analphabetic symbols” (coined by Robert Bringhurst). I then went to work for an editor and was paid to fix all the typographic mistakes that writers made using MS Word. I still regularly use the em dash in my writing. Even on my iPhone, I press and hold the hyphen key to select other dashes from a pop-up menu.

Now my beloved em dash (—) is getting a bad rap because regular people don’t know how to use it but AI does. If it appears in writing, people claim the piece was produced by AI. What are the rest of us supposed to do—those of us who know how to use glyphs and symbols correctly?

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

To my knowledge this is the only country that this happens with, outside of obvious countries like "The United States of America" where the "the" is included in the name.