[Alyssa Miranda]

can be to the writer. It hadn't occurred to me to consult it before opining on the use of the dash in a previous post, and when I clicked on gmw's link I found 13 or so pages devoted to the subject, including 35 references. When you consider that this is just one of about 40 punctuation marks you can find discussed in Wikipedia, you appreciate how useful it can be in answering usage questions when they come up.

With respect to the "em" versus "en" dash controversy, apparently the positions can be passionately held. The Canadians, for example, dismiss the "em" dash as being nothing more than a "padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography." Another tidbit I found interesting is the use of the "horizontal bar," or "quotation dash," to introduce quoted text. I first encountered this in reading Joyce's Dubliners (tried to use italics here but the software wouldn't let me), and wondered why he didn't use quotation marks like everybody else. That this use of the dash was common in Ireland at the time could explain that.

Of more than historical interest is a final tidbit noted in the Wikipedia article, namely the potential typographical havoc that can result from the use of the "em" dash without spaces (the grotesque justifications you occasionally encounter in Word come to mind), and a way to avoid it by using "thin," "hair," or ""zero-width" spaces, none of which I knew existed until reading the Wikipedia article.