vmarinelli:

First world problem: What do you MEAN the em dash I copied and pasted from the Wikipedia entry on that particular punctuation mark as looked up on my blackberry into the Tweet field in one of my three Twitter blackberry apps appears on the web as something unintelligible involving horizontally stacked numbers inside a rectangle?

I can explain this, but it’s boring.

The em-dash character is hexadecimal #2014, which is represented by two bytes: 20 and 14. But your Twitter app is stupid and doesn’t understand multibyte characters. So when it submitted your tweet, it sent your em dash as two single-byte ASCII characters: #20 (space) and #14 (control-T), the second of which is an invisible control code left over from the good old days of teletypes and line printers. Now, Twitter is also very, very stupid, and it doesn’t care if you put teletype control codes in your tweets. It just passes them on to your browser unchanged. And your browser represents any character it can’t print using a box with numbers in it—which is actually useful and not stupid for anyone who cares about character encodings, but ugly and weird for people who fell asleep halfway through this paragraph which is everybody la la la I can say whatever I want cockmuffin twatwaffle tittybiscuit.

So anyway, the solution to your first-world problem is to get a better Twitter app. If all of the Blackberry apps do this, then the solution is to get an iPhone just kidding not really.