Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today,

we're going to talk about the AIMDash and the difference between a caregiver and a caretaker.

I have been hoping this idea I keep seeing on social media that m-dashes are a sign of AI writing will burn itself out.

But it just keeps going and it's driving me crazy.

I am so annoyed that I had to drop everything and crash this piece into the editorial schedule.

Because m-dashes are definitely

not a sign of AI writing and I'm seeing too many people thinking they are. I have been using

m-dashes more in my writing over the last few weeks. Every time I see another social media post about it,

I use another m-dash. Now, nobody is sure where it came from and I can find social media post about it, I use another M-Dash. Now, nobody is sure where it came from, and I can find social media posts from last year

talking about it. But the conversation seemed to really surge in March when the LuxGen podcast,

a Gen Z podcast about fashion, beauty, life advice, and pop culture, referred to it as, quote, a longer

hyphen in a video on March 22nd that got about 2.5 million total views on Instagram and

TikTok. Here's the relevant part of the audio. The chat GPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at

the moment. Pretty little thing recently had a rebrand.

The top most light comment was someone being like, I can't believe they let chat

chachypti hyphen in.

It's a longer hyphen.

I don't know if you've noticed it.

You can tell they're talking about something they saw other people talking about.

So they didn't create the idea, but they're very likely the ones

who put rocket fuel behind it. The day after this video, March 23rd, you can see searches for the

phrase M-Dash spike up on Google trends in most English-speaking countries, and it has stayed higher

...