I was going to post basically this. There is only one dash, and it's the one for which my keyboard has a key. Minus sign, hyphen, or any other use case. When MS word autocorrects to something else, I always angrily undo it, because I don't know or care what it's doing.

-proud dash luddite

That's the comment I was looking for to rally behind. I use the same character `-` for all purposes: minus, hyphen, em/en dash. It's easy to type and it makes practically no difference in meaning or legibility. I refuse to waste my time differentiating between multiple variations of a short horizontal line with a few pixels more or less. Ain't nobody got time for that.

By the same logic, why bother with capital letters then?

Legibility. Same with punctuation marks.

Throwing my hat in here. The sub millimeter difference in the length of a dash conveys no additional meaning or clarity. It is impossible to argue me out of this position.

It's not like you can reliably write these consistently by hand either without going over the top in length to make it extremely obvious.

Length of breath/pause with a longer dash. Read some -- Emily Dickinson poems – you'll find a world ––– of meaning ––– in the millimeter.

I have read her in the past and can't say there were world's of meaning between -'s. Can you link an example? I looked again and couldn't see any obvious ones. Generally she just completely abused the -. Does she even use a comma once? lol

worlds. world's would indicate that a world owns something.

Also, you can just write -s instead of -'s as the apostrophe indicates possession

Exactly the type of comment I'd expect to see on an HN discussion about different types of dashes.

Poetry routines breaks grammar rules. A lot of poems rely on very specific white space layouts that you'd never see in writing.

And your example shows how you can just use multiple dashes instead of having three different ones.

Here's some examples where the en dash could make things more clear:

-5--2°C

post-war-pre-digital era

See sections 10-O-15-Q

Try Our New York-London Flight Connection!

-5°C to -2°C

post-war - pre-digital era (not a sentence any sane person would use anyway).

See sections 10-O - 15-Q

Try our New York-London flight connection! (no kind of dash clears this one up without fixing capitalisation).

The last one was a gotcha: it's their newly established York–London flight!

Try Our New York–London Flight Connection.

Or if it was New York:

Try Our New York – London Flight Connection.

Note the additional spaces. Agree on the capitalization though.

> Try Our New York – London Flight Connection.

I'd wager serious money that if you put that on a sign and surveyed people, at least in the US, they'd all still conclude it is a "New York" to "London" flight.

What's the use of a communication tool, if it doesn't actually communicate anything to real people?

York doesn't have an active airport

In my region at least, -5 ~ -2°C, or -5°C ~ -2°C. If the something is making people confuse, we replace it with a suitable substitution. Re-educating people is really just last resort. Is there anything keeping us from changing it other than ego?

In all countries I've lived in (and until right now, I thought the entire world), that would mean "-5 is approximately equal to -2".

-5 - 2°C

= -7°C

HTH!

Have you heard of "to"?

Sorry, lol? You didn't really think this through. This is what that looks like using en/em

-5—2

That looks like dogshit.

It's a mistake in the first place to decide to use only dashes and no spaces to convey all of this lol

-5 - 2 (Everyone knows a sign has no space - if you are building your sign for idiots try some of these:)

-5 > 2 -5->2 -5 <-> 2 -5 to 2 -5...2 Between -5 and 2

blah blah blah

This sort of anti-intellectualism is the perfect antidote for those who claim that improper grammar is nothing more than evidence of language "evolving."

I think many grammar rules are not intellectual but just randomly evolved conventions.

E.g. some English language rule says that a comma or ending period of a non-quoted sentence goes inside the quotes if there's something quoted at the end of that sentence. That rule feels anti-intellectual to me, as if there's some misunderstanding of how hierarchical placement in one-dimensional space works (since something that's not being quoted is being put inside quotes)

Spelling used to be more fluid and up to the writer/printer. Printers would also use different spellings as a mechanism to change the line width and otherwise format text to their liking.

https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Histengl/spelling.html

That "rule" is the rule in America but not elsewhere. Please break it. It is stupid.

What is more intellectual about wanting to complicate the language for one reason, versus wanting to simplify it for another?

Em dashes don’t convey much meaning or clarity for me.

Rather, seeing too short of a dash is like putting two clashing colors together or wearing two pieces of clothes that don’t match. It just looks instantly off.

It’s just not aesthetically pleasing for me.

uh, really?

i really like using em dashes -- for some reason, it feels "better" in my head than using something like a comma or a semi-colon.

Then why didn't you use an em dash?

you can use double dashes to symbolize an em-dash (i prefer to using an actual em-dash, which is option+shift+- in macos).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Approximating_the_em_dash...

I take this advice like "do not use a preposition to end a sentence with" and "pay close attention to 'much' and 'many'". Personal preferences from the 1800s taken as gospel by grammatical extremists, to the point where they're taken as some kind of solid rule in a vain attempt to forcefully shape language to a personal preference.

There are cases when you want to follow certain guidelines, for sure. If you write for a publication that adheres to Meriam-Webster, you'd better stay consistent and figure out the right AltGr code to type the right dashes. However, for the 99.99% of written media today, none of that matters.

Ending sentences with prepositions is and had always been fine. It has never been a serious rule of grammar that you may not end a sentence with a preposition. It does sometimes make a sentence sound better to rewrite it so that it doesn't end with one though. For example, "do not use a preposition to end a sentence with" sounds awkward to my ears, probably because you deliberately crafted the sentence to end with a preposition even though that is not naturally what you'd end that sentence with. (The previous sentence doesn't sound awkward to me, interestingly.)

Getting "much" and "many" right is completely different. They mean different things. Confusing them makes you sound stupid. Less vs fewer is the same. It often doesn't matter but in some cases it really grates on the ears (eg "there wasnt much people there" just sounds awful).

Dashes are not in the same category. They are orthographical conventions. They aren't really grammar. They are more like spelling. You can spell things wrong and say it doesn't matter because spelling is arbitrary and you can use the wrong dashes too, but it makes you look either uncaring or ignorant. If you want to give a good first impression, learn the basic conventions of written English and follow them.

"Much" and "many" are not interchangeable:

"I have too many water in the cup."

"How much people are in attendance?"

These sound obviously incorrect.

> Personal preferences from the 1800s taken as gospel by grammatical extremists, to the point where they're taken as some kind of solid rule in a vain attempt to forcefully shape language to a personal preference.

This is also true of "less" and "fewer". I use "less" everywhere.

i refuse to care about this lowercase letters are all i will ever use i see no possible reason to use the other symbols

Suit yourself, but if you refuse to learn basic grammar you will be treated like you are stupid and uneducated. Like it or not, presentation matters. Getting the basics right, including things like spelling, grammar, etc, shows a basic attention to detail without which your services will likely do more harm than good.

The various dashes are not "basic grammar" they are for pedants to argue amongst one another while the rest of the world just gets thing done.

> etc,

actually it's "etc."

(I wouldn't usually be a pedant, but if you think the difference between "--" and "—" matters, you should probably try to get the basics right too.)

Wrong. Look at any dictionary. Etc is completely fine. What next, are you going to pretend you write N.A.S.A. or Mr. White? Come on

>Mr. White

As opposed to what, exactly?

Mr White, which is correct English. I believe Americans might put a dot after these abbreviations, but nobody else does.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc. - even the URL has the period, and I did in fact look this up before replying :)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etc even redirects to the correct URL with a "."

Merriam-Webster is an American dictionary and therefore totally irrelevant to me.

You said "look at any dictionary", so I did. I notice you can't provide a link to a single dictionary that supports you, or even name what dialect supposedly doesn't have "etc."

Etc. is an abbreviation for etcetera. Correctly signifying contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms is far more commonplace than using the correct dash. Almost everyone would have learned about shortening words in high school; many people leave university without ever having heard of an em dash.

Etc is also an abbreviation of et cetera. Only Americans put pointless dots everywhere.

This is all stuff you learn in school. Punctuation isn't obscure or niche. You may not have learnt about semicolons or em dashes in school but you should have and I did. As did anyone that has ever read a novel. There are two semicolons on the first page of the first Harry Potter book, a novel read by approximately every child of my generation. There are loads of examples of the proper use of dashes and other "obscure" punctuation marks in any professionally typeset text.

> Only Americans

I was raised and educated in Africa, specifically the GCSE curriculum. I was taught to use etc.

I prefer &c

me too, do not think it makes a different in actual writing, like handwriting.

En dashes, I'll grant you, are pointless. Those can go away.

However, em dashes are a different case. The main reason why it's desirable to use em dashes (beside convention) is for clarity of purpose. The hyphen is already a very overloaded character; they're extensively used to denote ranges and link compound words. Importantly, both of those usages do not correspond to pauses in spoken language. If you're voicing a hyphen you're supposed to barrel on through it. An em dash is much closer to a parenthesis, comma, or semicolon. It's a meaningful break in the sentence, in the way that a hyphen isn't.

Now, if it were up to me I'd choose a different character to replace em dashes (maybe underscores), but that's a separate argument.

Just use two dashes. Or like you said, use parentheses, commas, or semi-colons

Two dashes are fine, the other options have different literary functions than em dashes, and shouldn't generally be used as replacements.

Real monsters use a signle dash but with a wider font.

Yeah, trying to get people to take Em vs En vs Hyphen seriously is a fool's errand. Only typography nerds would take it seriously and there just aren't enough of them to make a difference. I'd guess that the vast majority of people have never even heard of these distinctions.

I don’t care about the length of the mark, but I did find this idea useful. Prone to excessive detail, I often find myself with a parenthetical inside of parenthetical. The developer in me insists on 2 closing parentheses. But it looks weird and nerdy. Although, using an em dash instead is probably just as nerdy.

> Dashes are used inside parentheses, and vice versa, to indicate parenthetical material within parenthetical material. ...

> The bakery’s reputation for scrumptious goods (ambrosial, even—each item was surely fit for gods) spread far and wide.

Long live the parenthetical!

I wish it was more popular, it neatly indicates meaning so very well.

This is coming from someone who can only speak English: what a stupid language. How is having 3 symbols that are discernible only by their, almost identical, length a good idea? How would one grade a paper for correct usage, especially if handwritten?

I agree with you completely.

And that is why noone will remember your name.