99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
The strange history of a punctuation mark that makes writing feel human, and why people now think it proves the opposite.
7,405 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions, but then they don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/invisible. Terms apply.
If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed Sponsored Jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com/podcast. That's Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.
99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart, in the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
Last summer, despite his better judgment, Brian Vance found himself in a 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, 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 something called Stumptown Savings.
That is frequent 99PI contributor Will Aspinall.
Stumptown 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 $3.99 each. Annie's Organic Salad Dressing Select Varieties $2 for $8. You can see this is pretty dry. Like, 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 guise that I'm gonna win like a Pulitzer Prize in literature for this.
It mightn't be 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 Stumptown 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 M-dash 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 M dash.
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, colons, semicolons, 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, 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 Ms 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 mean.
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 M dash'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, 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 third 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 Compagnie de Signe.
But we're mercifully going to call him Bonnie. He practiced something called Ars dictuminis, 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 virgula sursum 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 recognise today. It remains his greatest contribution to punctuation. And if you're fluent in Italian, which I am not, you will know that virgola means comma, and in French, it's virgule.
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 that 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. Yeah, 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 hags! I will have such revenges on you both, that all the world shall... 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 a posseopisis, which is an ancient Greek term for speech that is deliberately broken off mid-sentence. Used 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 gives a bit more expressiveness than, you know, 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 Gilgood 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 a posseopisis 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 Laurence Stern in seventeen fifty-nine.
With us, you see, the case is quite different.
Dash.
We are all ups and downs in this matter.
You are a great genius.
Or tis fifty to one, sir, that you are a great dunce and a blockhead.
Not that there is a total want of intermediate steps.
No.
We're not so irregular as that comes to.
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-strewn 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 is, he's trying to commit this almost stream of consciousness narrative to paper, and it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Just the, I don't know what it is, there's something about the... The kind of the the the verve, the kind of the gusto behind it. It must have been like a bolt from 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 sort of the sake of prurience. 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 Meryton. But Wickham is not all that he seems, and when his character is introduced, Austen uses dashes to redact the letters and 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 the is what she's trying to get across. Again, it's in the it's in the service of, I guess, of dramatic realism or the the perception of realism here. I couldn't possibly say that thing. These are honorable men, 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 one 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, one dash every 90.
A lot of this widespread adoption caught on because of how versatile the M dash can be. At its 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 described as 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 M dash was a punctuation mark that can 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 the human mind.
Much madness is divinest sense to a discerning eye. Much sense the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority in this as all prevails. 'Assent, and you are sane. Demur, 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 favorite poets. How are we doing?
Perfect. Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred 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 are, uh, 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, uh, 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 that 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 we read it?
So, um, "Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man. Poverty be justifying for so foul a thing. Possibly, but we would rather from our garret go white unto the white creator than invest our snow."
I mean, I noticed when you read it, you, you... You kind of, you did run over a few dashes.
Well, but listen, how, how would you read it? Read it with the dash, 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, so you're assuming that a dash 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 meter. We know how it goes. Publication is the auction of the mind of man. Poverty be justifying for so foul a thing. So the, 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, mind blown. That's so often twenty five years ago.
When Emily Dickinson died in eighteen eighty six at the age of fifty five, her handwritten poems were edited and published by Mabel Lewis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. They gave the poems 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 eighteen ninety. Out of the one thousand one hundred and fifty one dashes, they kept just fifty two 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 nineteenth century audience. Yes, so it looks to us like a hatchet job, but it looks to that readership in the eighteen nineties as something familiar, something they can read. It's avant garde, it's, it's strange, it's, it's unusual. And it doesn't feel like nineteenth 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 has 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 gashes which occur without any reason whatsoever, sometimes twice or thrice in one line and never less 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 Creasy 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 Pride and 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, 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 over-usage 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, who, who, who I think use the dash so as to sound lyrical and ought to be more decisive about what they're saying. So it kind of multi-purpose, 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 M dash 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 writers like Henry James, Jack Kerouac, or Brian Vance from Stumptown 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 two for six. 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 M dash 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 M dash is a dead giveaway that someone's using ChatGPT. But some people see an M dash probably for, you know, the hundredth time this week. And they instantly assume ChatGPT wrote that.
People around the internet started to notice that many large language models like ChatGPT have the tendency to deploy the N 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.
ChatGPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at the moment. Okay. Pretty little thing recently had a rebrand. The top most liked comment was someone being like, I can't believe they let ChatGPT hyphen in. It's a longer hyphen. I don't know if you've noticed it. Advice 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 ChatGPT 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 Von asked Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, about this on his podcast, Altman claimed he added the dashes for LOLs.
Why does ChatGPT 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 added more M dashes. And now I think we have too many M dashes. But that's the answer is it was just like users liked it, we put more in. Now it's like a little bit of a meme and it's kind of, it's quite annoying to me. We should, we should fix that.
It's not entirely clear whether Altman's telling us the whole story. And industry insiders like Sean Gedeker believe it's much more complicated than that.
It's surprisingly hard to, to find the answer. There's, there's not the kind of consensus on the topic that, that you would expect for something so observable. Certainly all of the closed models, i.e. all of the best models, the, the process of training them is, is a trade secret.
Sean says that this is a pretty recent phenomenon and that ChatGPT hasn't always used a lot of M dashes in its writing.
So GPT three point five came out in November twenty twenty two and didn't use a lot of M dashes.
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 six hundred thousand Enron emails. Probably not a ton of M dashes used in those Enron emails.
And then July twenty twenty four, 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.
ChatGPT users all began to notice not just that M dashes were frequently used, but that the LLM wouldn't stop using it. Numerous OpenAI and Reddit threads from frustrated users claimed 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 timeframe that led to the emergence of the M dash. And in June twenty twenty five, 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, uh, print books from older decades that, that perhaps weren't as represented in the, in the previous training data.
Court documents have shown that Anthropic aimed to expand the language model not just by feeding it 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 digitized 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 part. 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-dashes 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 M-dash was written by AI. In fact, the reason why LLMs add M-dashes 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 are still subtle hints that a piece of writing has been composed using AI, a formal tone, specific vocabulary words, a certain kind of beige-ness 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's all about.
The thought that you can save time, that 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, okay? 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 win. If you tell ChatGPT not to use M-dashes 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 M-dash 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 Fiona if she'd send us out with her favourite poem by Emily M-Dash 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 raveled out of sound like balls upon the floor.
Isn't that wild?
Coming up, Will tells me about one weapon in the battle against AI writing: typography. Stay with us.
This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every design thing began as something someone imagined: a chair, a sign, whatever device you're listening to this on. Design is imagination with a plan. Claude is an AI built to help you with both. Start with your rough idea, then work with Claude to sketch it, shape it, test it, and build it. Anthropic built Claude to help you discover more. Learn more at claude.ai/99invisible. Sonos is a sound system engineered to make you feel. Sound is part of the design of a home, right alongside the furniture, and the lighting, and the art. Sonos can give ordinary rituals a little more personality.
Making coffee can feel like opening credits. Dinner prep can feel like a cooking show. Or for me, I like to make it sound like a mosh pit. And tidying up can at least have a better soundtrack. Because Sonos works as a system, the mood can move with you from the kitchen to the living room to wherever the day happens next. It's not about making every moment louder. It's about making more moments feel like yours. Whatever you want to feel, Sonos can help set the scene. Every night, I play the ambient sleep music channel on the Sonos in my bedroom, and it helps me relax, it helps me sleep better. The Sonos is on almost 24 hours a day when I'm not recording. Love the sound, feel the system. Visit sonos.com to build your system.
We know life is busy. That's why saving money should be effortless. With Atlantic Union Bank's Roundup Savings, every time you use your debit card, your purchase rounds up to the nearest dollar and automatically goes into savings. So whether you're grabbing coffee, filling the tank, or picking up groceries, you're saving without even thinking about it. It's just one of the ways Atlantic Union Bank makes managing your money easy. Learn more at atlanticunionbank.com or stop by a branch today. Atlantic Union Bank, any way you bank.
With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
So we're back with Will Aspinall. And in the main story, you talked about how the M dash got caught up in the sort of existential dread that comes along with AI. There's been kind of this stigma associated with using the M dash, how it's the sort of like this 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 police and actually up M dash use exponentially. A creative agency based in Sydney, Australia called Coco Gun has opted for another approach, a redesign of the M dash called the AM dash.
OK, 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 flair. 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, the left end, it kind of curves down and the right end, it curves up. It's kind of like an M dash with serifs on it, sort of like a tilde.
Exactly, yeah. And my initial reaction was it looks like one of those kind of suave twenties-style pencil mustaches. 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 very scarcity is that what makes it AI-proof. Because language models go on probability. The likelihood of ChatGPT using an AM dash 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, you know, the hour of and all that kind of thing. But just to make a pointed comment on where we are in culture with this thing.
That's Ant Mulder, the co-founder of Coke 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, you know, to a machine, to an algorithm.
Okay. So if I'm understanding this correctly, using an Amdash instead of an Mdash is 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 Mdash? 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 Coke Gun. They're called Times New Human, which is the serif option, and Areal, which is the sans.
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 a hyphen, and it'll insert that little moustache dash into your, into your work. So to replace the Mdash 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 a 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, headline in the New York Times that had used the Amdash, that would
Be just, that'd be, you know, dream come true. I'm helping out, Ant, 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 ordeal 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, 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, 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, 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 Areal.
Nice.
99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall and edited by Vivian Le. 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, oikofuge.com.
Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, LaShamadon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM 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 3 on the Dickinson M-dash scale.
This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT, RemedyPant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So, when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's Syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain,
or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NUR-TAC or visit Nurtac.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.
Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise vacation, gift cards from DoorDash, and Best Buy.
Then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag. No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. age 18 plus. See playatmcd.com for rules and playatmcd.com slash A M O E for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2. Chesscar game ends November 8. Game ends November 22, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.
Your information may be for sale online.
Yeah, I'll take four social security numbers and a maiden name.
LifeLock finds and removes exposed info from data brokers that could put your identity and finances at risk.
Nine email addresses, please.
And if those sites put your information back online...
And a dozen phone numbers.
LifeLock will remove that, too. Save up to 30% your first year at lifelock.com/specialoffer. Terms apply.
Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
