Folks with vaginas, I’m conducting some family comparative analysis and I’d like to know how many standard pieces of toilet paper do you use when wiping after a pee. I posted some comments with options to upvote if you like.

  • @apostrofail
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    -74 hours ago

    Tip: “–”, en dash, is used for ranges like 2–3—not “-”, hyphen

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      94 hours ago

      How on earth did English typography get so weird with mdash, ndash, dash, hyphen, etcetera while most of the readers have no clue about the the differences. IMHO, just use dash.

      Can you explain me how the different lengths of dash add to the understanding of the text, when I usually don’t even see the difference on my mobile phone screen?

      • @apostrofail
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        13 hours ago

        They have different meanings where the lengths help at a glance such as using en dash for a compound adjective or em dash for a longer pause for a clause. This aides in reading even if you only pick up on it subconsciously.

      • @apostrofail
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        13 hours ago

        What is a “standard” keyboard? No such thing as every region has different keyboards & variants inside those regions. I can use AltGr on my desktop keyboard & holding the hyphen key on mobile allows easy selection of em dash & en dash.

        • Skull giver
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          fedilink
          11 hour ago

          I don’t think this is possible without alt codes on standard Windows configurations. MacOS has shortcuts for them and Linux has them too (if you have compose enabled, which is disabled by default).

          Works on phones through the special character input. Sometimes. Depends on your language, location, and keyboard of choice.

          Seems rather unnecessary and pedantic to tell others to use it, though. This is a forum, not a thesis.

        • lazynooblet
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          fedilink
          English
          32 hours ago

          I work for a multi-national IT department. I just happen to have a UK, FR and DE laptop on the workbench. I don’t see the em-dash on any of them. AltGr + hyphen does nothing on Windows (Google search says Mac supports this). None of these laptops have a numpad, but Google search says maybe CTRL+MINUS(numpad) may give an em-dash. Can’t test though.

          In any case, it seems the world has left behind em-dash, so correcting users on a public forum seems pointless.

          • @[email protected]
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            fedilink
            23 hours ago

            I had some doubts people would get the joke. I should go add an /s

            To answer your question it depends on the keyboard but i don’t actually care, the difference between - and – is just semantics to me.