> Spacing around an em dash varies. Most newspapers insert a space before and after the dash, and many popular magazines do the same, but most books and journals omit spacing, closing whatever comes before and after the em dash right up next to it.
Before the LLMs made the emdash the tool of the electronic oppressor I used it often enough and other people did too.
I hate that it's basically become the little hitler moustache of punctuation. There was at least one guy who was really enjoying his tiny little moustache until he couldn't anymore. That is the emdash for me.
In the spirit of good pedantic fun, I'll point out that en dashes are no less inconvenient than em dashes for the average Windows user to insert. The hyphen-minus immediately accessible on the keyboard was (and is) used for the common typewriting kludge attested in Garner's[1] as well as the LaTeX-syntax triple-hyphen em dash (which, might I add, for lack of a better place to do so, isn't one of the ways I've seen dashes used by LLMs or disguised by their operators).
