Em dash might be the colon for people who aren’t too sure what a colon does.
Not speaking from personal experience or anything.
Make that three. 
We get semicolons and em dashes in TidBITS article drafts regularly, so it’s something I pay attention to while editing. Although there certainly are differences, such as em dashes often being used in pairs like parentheses for an in-sentence aside, I see them more frequently being used to start a new clause that the author thinks is not quite up to the level of being a new sentence.
For a while, semicolons were extremely popular, and I was changing them into periods regularly. Then em dashes surged back, perhaps due to the academic implications of a semicolon. I try to keep both under control in articles, and although I have no stats on this, I think I prefer em dashes that are used in pairs to set off asides, rather than just starting a new clause.
There’s no real right or wrong here, just a matter of style.
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Can you give us a couple of examples?
Some say that comma comes from the middle age scribes; comma means pause a bit here, semi-colon, pause even more, and em dash, hey, really pause, we’re almost changing the subject here.
Notice that even space character contributes meaning. Exercise: a sentence where adding a space inside a word changes the meaning. [Don’t ask me; I do bet there are some such–just too lazy to try.]
People who are enjoying this thread but are beginning to hanker for a little variety, may be interested in the use of the space character in Thai script:
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There’s also the interpunct, which was prevalent in ancient languages, including early English. It was also used on tombstones and other stone carvings:
J.R.R. Tolkein used the interpunct in some of the languages he invented. And there is a Mac keyboard code for it if you ever want to use it:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7286403
And it’s still used in some of the New York City subway stops:
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There was talk a couple of years ago of reviving the use of the interpunct, or something similar, in French, to address perceived sexism. A group of people is always referred to in the male plural if it contains even a single male, so 100 actors would be “cent acteurs” even if 99 of them were female. The “solution” proposed would have rendered the group as “act·eur·rice·s”. For some bizarre and inexplicable reason, it seems not to have caught on.
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I’m typing this on my iPad, so I can’t keyboard a correct example. When Steve Jobs, who engineered typographical tools for Everyman, owned Pixar, Wall-E was spelled with an interpunct:
I studied the Thai language at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute for a full year in 1963. I have a knack for languages and I did very well. Subsequently I served two tours in Thailand, a total of 10 years.
I could not recite those lengthy rules for spacing between words and sentences (nor could any educated Thai whom I knew), but one develops a feeling for the technique after a while. Learning to read Thai without spaces between words is not difficult, as the rules for where Thai’s 44 consonants and 20-something written vowels may and may not be placed in a syllable provide a guide as to word endings and beginnings.
I was a bit nervous about learning to read Arabic and Hebrew, both written without vowels, but that, too, turns out to be not so difficult; one simply learns to vocalize the unwritten vowels by the meaning of words in context. And learning to read from right-to-left is a non-issue.
Next on my list is Classical Latin, but at age 78, it’s going to be a bit tougher, as the mind doesn’t have the flexibility it once had. My favorite thing so far: in Classical Latin (as opposed to ecclesiastical Latin): there is no “V” sound. Caesar would have said “Waney, Weedy, Weeky.”
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MMTalker wrote: “There’s also the interpunct, which was prevalent in ancient languages,
including early English.”
Music notation has plenty of dots with a variety of meanings depending on assorted contexts. In early European ‘white notation’ (late medieval through early renaissance), they could indicate a lengthening or shortening of a note, a change of rhythm or a stop sign to say ‘don’t do the normal thing here’. Some would hang in the staff not associated with any particular note. For decades, facsimile publishers carefully removed those along with foxing and other ‘problems’ with the original manuscript. Oops. Most modern (good) transcriptions put the dots above the staff where they’re easier to notice.
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The·interpunct·also·serves·a·role·when·‘Show·Invisibles’·is·selected·in·Word.
Pages uses a bullet to show the spaces.
Interesting that the Character Viewer calls the Interpunct a Katakana. It comes in half and full width versions.
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Not the same character. There are several different kind of “middle dot” characters symbols that look similar (and may even be identical in some fonts).
- The “normal” interpunct is UNICODE MIDDLE DOT (U+00B7)
- There’s a triangular version. MODIFIER LETTER HALF TRIANGULAR COLON (U+02D1)
- Hebrew has a middle-dot that is typically overlayed on characters as a sort of accent. HEBREW POINT DAGESH OR MAPPIQ (U+05BC)
- The dot used in dictionary pronunciation keys to indicate hypenation points. HYPENATION POINT (U+2027)
- A word separator used by some languages. WORD SEPARATOR MIDDLE DOT (U+2E31)
- Katakana’s middle-dots. KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT (U+30FB) and HALFWIDTH KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT (U+FF65)
And several others. All distinct characters with different semantic meanings, even though many may be rendered identically in certain fonts and sizes.
See also Wikipedia: Interpunct - Similar symbols.
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