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 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`... 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 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		# Dash Usage Guide Hyphen (-) = word-joiner En dash (–) = “to/between” Em dash (—) = pause, punch, drama

▲ reaperducer 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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npsomaratna 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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ted_dunning 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

None of us at our house did that.

	▲	reaperducer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		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 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	DonHopkins 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		{—}