How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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?

-5 - 2°C

York doesn't have an active airport

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

Have you heard of "to"?

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

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)

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.

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.

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

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

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".

= -7°C

HTH!