User blog:DamianDavis/Explain the -dash- markup to me.

I just noticed in a recent edit to the Twister that we have a markup tag &#123;&#123;dash&#125;&#125;. It translates into entity 8211, the n-dash, for which we already have internet-wide encoding for, &amp;ndash; (or &amp;#8211; if you prefer). This is some really incredible redundancy.

Now I'm a developer, I understand the need for technical delineation between all the hyphen-like characters. But having an extra alias just for this seems silly to me. Does it do something else I'm not aware of? Why do we have this markup tag?