Elle Cordova (@ellecordova) on Threads

Ms Cordova! Your posts are Always, ALWAYS, clever and entertaining! 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Thank you for dragging us away from the news

You make this retired, old, English teacher smile with every video you post. So clever. So well done. I appreciate your work.

Every single word is so cleverly chosen, hard to pick a favourite but I think “vowel play” has to be up there 😂 I have to wonder, did the Errorist have a guiding hand in turning these 10 towards murder?

Brilliant! Yeah? Or: stupendous, amazing, and more… (as if there could be more) — more what? Exactly.

Brilliantly done, as usual.

And can I say, you silly Americans with your dashes. I know this may sound radical, but sometimes a comma is enough. Not every sentence needs to be escorted across the road by an en dash, an em dash, a parenthetical aside, three clarifying subclauses, a small typographical crossing guard and a tiny legal department making sure the reader understands the author’s exact emotional temperature to ten decimal places.

European readers, through a dangerous combination of public education, surviving subtitles and not being raised entirely inside a commercial break, are sometimes able to infer meaning from context. A comma can suggest a pause. A full stop can end a thought. A paragraph can even contain tension without firing a punctuation flare gun halfway through the sentence.

The American dash, by contrast, often feels like the writer grabbing your face and saying: “This part is connected to the previous part, but also different, and I need you to understand the vibe, the timing, the irony, the subtext and the legally approved amount of ambiguity before we proceed.” An en dash is already suspicious, a little bridge with career ambitions. But the em dash is worse.

The em dash is a comma that went to business school, hired a brand consultant and came back claiming it could disrupt the pause economy. A comma trusts the reader. A full stop respects the reader. A dash says: please remain seated while the sentence explains itself.

How long before you guys invent the textual equivalent of a seatbelt?

Never ceases to amaze me — this is just here to irritate you — how European writers can say so little with so much. Tsk tsk tsk.