Folks with vaginas, I’m conducting some family comparative analysis and I’d like to know how many standard pieces of toilet paper do you use when wiping after a pee. I posted some comments with options to upvote if you like.
Tip: “–”, en dash, is used for ranges like 2–3—not “-”, hyphen
How on earth did English typography get so weird with mdash, ndash, dash, hyphen, etcetera while most of the readers have no clue about the the differences. IMHO, just use dash.
Can you explain me how the different lengths of dash add to the understanding of the text, when I usually don’t even see the difference on my mobile phone screen?
They have different meanings where the lengths help at a glance such as using en dash for a compound adjective or em dash for a longer pause for a clause. This aides in reading even if you only pick up on it subconsciously.
What is a “standard” keyboard? No such thing as every region has different keyboards & variants inside those regions. I can use AltGr on my desktop keyboard & holding the hyphen key on mobile allows easy selection of em dash & en dash.
I work for a multi-national IT department. I just happen to have a UK, FR and DE laptop on the workbench. I don’t see the em-dash on any of them. AltGr + hyphen does nothing on Windows (Google search says Mac supports this). None of these laptops have a numpad, but Google search says maybe CTRL+MINUS(numpad) may give an em-dash. Can’t test though.
In any case, it seems the world has left behind em-dash, so correcting users on a public forum seems pointless.
