Too many people get dashes confused with hyphens. Here’s a hint: That little key right after the zero—that’s a hyphen! Not a dash! For example, it’s “Overt hyphen ops dot com” not “overt dash ops dot com”. Hyphens are used to join words to make them (sort of) one word. Like in a web address. You know how people always used to say “that’s all one word”? Well, hyphens are basically another way of making it one word. Incidentally, my email address used to be “thatsalloneword” (I still use that one as a spam receptacle). Dashes are a completely different thing.

Another thing that bugs me is people that still say “forward slash”—it’s just a slash! Just because one is called a backslash doesn’t mean the other needs to be named a forward slash. “Slash” will do. People can figure out that, if it doesn’t have the word “back” in front of it, it probably isn’t a backslash. It’s like if you build something, then unbuild it. Do you need to create a new word, like “ununbuild” to differentiate the two? Nope. “Build” is fine on its own. And so is “Slash”.