> I speak of the elegant, elongated hyphen, the gentle friend and ally of all writers, used to set off a chunk of text within a sentence.
There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.
If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.
I totally agree: em-dashes simply do not belong glued to the words on either side, style guides be damned! They look awful and wrap badly. There are no other punctuation marks that conceptually separate words without spaces! Every other punctuation mark that connects two words brings them syntactically closer together than a single space. And/or, hyphen-style, person@place, A&W, foo.bar -- they're all creating a closer association between the words than a space would. Why should the em dash stand alone in making a more distant association -- essentially a lower-precedence operator -- while removing spaces? It's nonsense. Put spaces around your em-dashes and fuck the style guides!
I was wondering about this since a while. It looks weird to me as in German between the word and the em dash a space is mandatory. (At least some decades ago.)
The elegance referred to is grammatical, not typographic.