Brilliant historical information there, Don. Your comment about The Typewriter Generation is an interesting one, and that's probably the reason I think of the hyphen/minus/en-dash as all the same as well -- because that's all there was on the keyboard, one dash fits all.
I can't remember when I arrived at the em-dash, and the use of two typewriter-dashes to represent them. I'd have to check my old college papers to see if I used em-dashes when I still used a typewriter. I do remember that at some point years after I switched to PCs I figured out how to program a key-combination in Word that produced an actual em-dash. A thrilling discovery! (And come to think of it, I still need to do that on my spanking new PC.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-06-01 03:54 pm (UTC)I can't remember when I arrived at the em-dash, and the use of two typewriter-dashes to represent them. I'd have to check my old college papers to see if I used em-dashes when I still used a typewriter. I do remember that at some point years after I switched to PCs I figured out how to program a key-combination in Word that produced an actual em-dash. A thrilling discovery! (And come to think of it, I still need to do that on my spanking new PC.)