[JdeBP]

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.

[jml78]

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.

[JdeBP]

    ... 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)

[YVoyiatzis]

# Dash Usage Guide

*Hyphen (-)* = word-joiner

*En dash (–)* = “to/between”

*Em dash (—)* = pause, punch, drama

[reaperducer]

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.

[npsomaratna]

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).

[Breza]

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.

[ted_dunning]

None of us at our house did that.

[reaperducer]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

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

[DonHopkins]

{—}