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I'm 49 and they're my bread and butter. Em-dashes Army unite!!

surrounded by spaces... right?

Yeah, I do that. Maybe it's a reaction to badly kerned fonts I've encountered or maybe I just didn't notice the words were more or less joined by the em-dash. I guess I've been treating it as a long hyphen all this time.

Only after, not before.

Maybe the only cool thing to come out of this kooky obsession then: people are learning more about the wider world of punctuation.

I just thought it was cool when I learned that there were glyphs with names that indicated how wide they were.

And I believe the letter "x" is the standard for determining font height? Someone can correct me.

Anyone working on HTML 20 years ago was very familiar with — as a layout/typography tool. I think I used them before that but learned the name from typing it so much.