but I also hate people who think they can set text in small caps by using normal capitals in a smaller point size. Penguin Books do this on their spines these days

Oh, my. I have not seen that. I'll have to run down to the local bookstore and confirm it. I believe that poor typesetting from Penguin may be one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Oh -- and you're right about ` and ' being inappropriately used (and by me), but since this board won't accept character entities, it's the best I can do. And in US typesetting, the em dash is still used for parenthetical clauses. But, then, that type of parenthetical clause has become fairly uncommon in US usage.