No, people tried to sell “prompt engineering” services well beyond that — especially for image generating AIs, which where believed to need extra instructions like “professional lighting”, a name of a camera model, lens parameters, etc.
That depends. Your interpretation is “em+en+em”. But another, potentially wittier interpretation is “em in em”, i.e., you split an em-dash into two en-dashes and put an em-dash inside.
I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever.
The comment about your keyboard is ironic given the nerd forum we're in. The em and en dashes live on my keyboard alongside the hyphen because I'm a techie and I know how to put them there. My Android keyboard has them too and I didn't even need to put them there myself.
I'm in my 40s and I also prefer to call people on Discord, Telegram, Signal or (if no other option available) WhatsApp. The phone dialer is just inconvenient, while the above-mentioned chat apps have all the contacts listed and easy to access. There's also a slight worry about being charged for every phone call and every SMS and having to worry about your phone plan and texting plan separately from your data plan; maybe that's not a thing anymore but it used to be really worrying, so it gives me more peace of mind to only have to worry about the data plan and nothing else.
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