Unless you are looking at, for example, Eric Gill’s Essay on Typography, it is a relatively recent convention.
According to Bringhurst, the predominant Canadian use is space en dash space.
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I myself prefer spaces before and after the Em dash but only in editors like InDesign that have fine typography controls to insert “thin spaces” instead of a full space.
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I suspect ‘nominally UK’ may be doing a lot of work there. I can think of no reason why they would do such a thing other than recognising that perhaps the larger share of the readership would be North America based. It really is exceedingly rare here, to the extent that it causes me to halt my reading if I ever see it and go “yep - an American”.
Which one is the recent convention - it was not clear from your comment. I think you mean that emdashnospaces is the recent convention?
Good for Canadians! 
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Alt+0151 FTW! (Alt+0150 for an en dash.) I memorized those 35 years ago when it was the only way to get them in Word (for DOS!). Sometimes still use 'em instead of trying to remember the Word “shortcuts.”
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From what I remember, the push to move anglophone users beyond ASCII was spearheaded by the book The Mac is not a typewriter– which is readily available as a pdf, though not legally.
The Mac’s keyboard was ideal for this sort of typographical wizardry. I did have the misfortune of needing to use a windows computer daily in the early 2000s, and I found I faced this unpleasant choice:
- I could use a “international” keyboard with dead keys, and enjoy my accented characters.
- I could use a different keyboard layout for writing C++ code. The “dead keys” from the international keyboard were syntactically important, and I thought that C++ triglyphs were ugly.
- I could memorize ascii codes and use the numeric keyboard.
I remap my keyboards to add them in, though my phone keyboard handles them fine on it’s own.
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I suspect it helped that Steve Jobs was a bit of a type geek; he used to talk about how the hand lettering classes he took in college were one of the major reasons the Macintosh OS was built with robust support for digital typography.
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I’ll take an em-dash over an ellipsis any day. The ellipsis is prone to such misuse, like when people feel that spewing extra periods adds further emphasis somehow.......... or worse, when they,,,for some reason,,,think mutliple commas are supposed to mean something.
(Oh, neat, those both automatically get corrected here.)
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Neither or both. The concept that there was or should be a convention on which form is correct is relatively recent (within the history of typesetting in English) and is adopted from various well-known style guides, for examples the Chicago Manual of Style and the University of Oxford Style Guide. One is not more correct than the other, and may, normally in older editions, appear on the other side of the Atlantic.
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In Discourse, type three hyphens—et voila—you have an automatic em dash. Two hyphens gives an en dash (–).
I don’t know how common this feature is.
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I use it—though not as often as I used to—for asides in texts, as a sort of parentheses that indicate that the aside is of equal weight.
Edit: I use the option-shift-hyphen for the em-dash, and the option-hyphen for the en-dash, btw. It’s in my Mac muscle memory, ever since I worked with QuarkXPress
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I use option-semicolon* to make ellipses. I don’t trust auto-replacers.
*on MacOS, US layout. Option-period on German keyboards
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None whatsoever. My predecessor as EIC was British born/bred/educated, he wrote the style guide based on other British journals, and the official dictionary for the journal is the Chambers Dictionary.
The journal now lives in the cloud, and I am not British, but the official locus of publication is a British university and it is archived by the British Museum.
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Did you mean MMMBop?
Personally, I’m preöccupied waiting for diaeresis to bust out of the New Yorker in some sort of ironic post-boomer comeback.
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As did Joyce.
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Lu Burke used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. Like Mr. Hyphen, Lu was a modern independent-minded reader, and she didn’t need to have her vowels micromanaged. Once, in the elevator, Weekes seemed to be weakening. He told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
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I like what author Karen Elizabeth Gordon wrote about the em dash.
The em dash is much too energetic and impetuous to have its story put on hold: a streak, a comet flash, a leap across a gap, it’s the most available of all punctuation marks, just because its form and function sometimes seem the closest to the way we think and perceive relationships. It’s really a sort of general factotum leapfrogger, turning reading, if it’s overused, into acrobatics, and ousting commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses from their rightful places. Use it effectively, and affectionately, but don’t let it take over and become a stylistic tic.
Here are a few of her examples:
He had one favorite maxim for the great white hunters — “Get lost.”
What — give up cringing?
I’m not exactly leaving — I’m just spreading my tentacles.
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LaTeX (in most font encodings) has --- as a ligature to —, and -- to –. If you want spaces around your mdash, then \, is a fixed thinner-than-normal space, as opposed to the inherently flexible space created by a … well, by a space. In any case, emdash and endash are normally places where a linebreak can happen. If you want a non-breaking space, then ~ will do you nicely. Guillemets are meant, in French usage, to be separated from the text by a non-breaking space, donc <<~c'est la bonne methode~>> to get “donc « c’est la bonne methode »”
Linux us-intl keyboard with Compose key gets me an emdash with Compose+---, an endash with Compose+--., and all sorts of other typographical goodness.
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thumbs up for Gordon!
If you need to read a grammar textbook, you might as well choose one with memorable prose. I’ve got the Well Tempered Sentence, and the Transitive Vampire.
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