The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.
Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...
I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.
Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.
Its about the actual character - if it's a minus sign, easily accessible and not frequntly autocorrected to a true em dash - then its likely human. I'ts when it's the unicode character for an em dash that i start going "hmm"
Mobile keyboards often make the em-dash (and en-dash) easily accessible. Software that does typographic substitutions including contextual substitutions with the em-dash is common (Word does it, there are browser extensions that do it, etc.), on many platforms it is fairly trivial to program your keyboard to make any Unicode symbol readily accessible.
Us habitual users of em dashes have no trouble typing them, and don’t think that emulating it with hyphen-minus is adequate. The latter, by the way, is also different typographically from an actual minus sign.
For us habitual users of em-dashes, it is saddening to have to think twice about using them lest someone think we are using an LLM to write…
My wife is a professional fiction writer and it's disheartening to see sudden accusations of the use of AI based solely on the usage of em-dashes.
Does it really matter though? I just focus on the point someone is trying to make, not on the tools they use to make it.
You’ve never run into a human with a tendency to bullshit about things they don’t have knowledge of?
I use the en-dash (Alt+0150) instead of the em.
The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.
Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...
> The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish.
But not in English, where the en-dash is used to denote ranges.
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I too use em-dashes all the time, and semi-colons of course.
Most keyboards don't have an em-dash key, so what do you expect?
I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.
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Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
On an Apple OS running default settings, two hyphens in a row will suffice—
Its about the actual character - if it's a minus sign, easily accessible and not frequntly autocorrected to a true em dash - then its likely human. I'ts when it's the unicode character for an em dash that i start going "hmm"
Mobile keyboards often make the em-dash (and en-dash) easily accessible. Software that does typographic substitutions including contextual substitutions with the em-dash is common (Word does it, there are browser extensions that do it, etc.), on many platforms it is fairly trivial to program your keyboard to make any Unicode symbol readily accessible.
Us habitual users of em dashes have no trouble typing them, and don’t think that emulating it with hyphen-minus is adequate. The latter, by the way, is also different typographically from an actual minus sign.
The em dash is also pretty accessible on my keyboard—just option+shift+dash
Microsoft word also auto inserts em-dashes through.