Fame is a bee./ It has a song — / It has a sting — / Ah, too, it has a wing,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Reader, she nailed it. If any mark of punctuation has ridden the crest of fame — and infamy — this year, it is the em dash. Once Dickinson’s signature flourish, it now stands accused of abandoning its swagger for the unimaginative servitude of chatbots. That a custodial battle has ensued between humans and AI over it feels — well — unsettling. After all, the em dash was living its best life before this dramatic turnaround: Charles Dickens deployed it with theatrical relish; Vladimir Nabokov coaxed it into capturing quicksilver ideas; Jane Austen used it as a discreet conspiratorial nudge.

A flash of personality in the grey corridors of syntax, the em dash — roughly the width of the letter

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