Board Thread:The Time Lord Academy/@comment-6433721-20130309061324/@comment-188432-20130309185720

To sorta echo user:Shambala108: This thing here - is not a dash under any circumstance. Where there be spaces around it or not, that is a hyphen.

This thing here – is also not a "proper" dash. It's an en-dash. I personally think it would be simpler if we just outlawed its use entirely, because the chances are people are not going to be able to grasp when to use it and when not.

The use of two hyphens, as with --, is what people did on typewriters in substitution for a "true dash", which they could not make. The "true dash" is an em-dash. It's clearly longer than a hyphen in the way that an en-dash is not. Here's the difference in the way these two things look:


 * The Doctor said he was coming back – quickly.
 * The Doctor said he was coming back — quickly.

To my eye, the em-dash looks like a proper dash, whereas you'd really have to compare the en-dash to a hyphen to know that it wasn't a hyphen. Here they are, side-by-side:
 * hyphen - en-dash – true dash'' —

The other problem with allowing an en-dash is that there is no standard typographical definition of it. An em-dash has a specific mathematical relationship to a hyphen in any font; an en-dash doesn't. It's just sorta "between" a hyphen and a dash.