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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

That's backwards. People in that age bracket grew up with computers where the em dash was not in the character set at all, and typewriters and terminals only had a minus key.

The people who grew up with the em dash are the younger HTML generation of 30 years ago where — was at least a reasonably convenient character entity even if they were using computers with the various 8-bit character sets that did not contain it.

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Correct, I am 46, grew up with BBS. Early internet. I will be honest, never knew the name of em dash until it became a GPT thing.

# Dash Usage Guide

*Hyphen (-)* = word-joiner

*En dash (–)* = “to/between”

*Em dash (—)* = pause, punch, drama

    ... meaning that you have read some posts on this page a certain way.  (-:
    --- IM2000
     * Origin: Some WWW site named Hacker News (2:257/609.3)

That's backwards. People in that age bracket grew up with computers where the em dash was not in the character set at all, and typewriters and terminals only had a minus key.

I guess you weren't there. We did em-dashes on typewriters. We just turned the platen knob down one click, typed _, and turned it back.

None of us at our house did that.

That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Your house is not the only house.

Moreover, your home is not representative of the millions of typewriters in businesses around the world.

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that folks who learned typing in the 80s and earlier use two dashes '--' instead of the em-dash (although modern word processors seem to replace this combination with the em-dash). Something else I've noticed is their tendency to use two blank spaces between sentences.

I'm a self-taught typist, with all the quirks that comes with (can type programming stuff very accurately at a 100+ WPM; can type normal stuff at a high WPM as well, but the error rate goes up).

I learned to type in the nineties and I used two hyphens. I also learned to put two spaces between sentences but dropped that in the oughts.

True, but when desktop publishing arrived on the Mac, I embraced it.

{—}

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