>>40416
>>have to say (who?) in here.
>Everybody, I can't even think of an individual.
That might depend on the where. On the Hungary the term "Dark Ages" were never used in this exact form as a name, it was always "Middle Ages" or "Early Middle Ages" which sometimes got an epithet "dark Middle Ages" or "dark Early Middle Ages". I think the second version of this is lot rarer to avoid stacking the adjectives, and the whole formula is just a rhetoric device and not a serious judgement.
Other countries, due to the lack of language expertise from my part, I can't say but I can imagine various uses just on this basis.
In Anglo historical use maybe The New Cambridge Medieval History is a good example since it was composed with the intention to show the change that occurred in scientific view from the publication of The Cambridge Medieval History a century ago. The first two volumes of the New dabbles in the era and throughout almost 2000 pages the term "Dark Ages" used about half a dozen times, mostly framed by apostrophes, while the whole volumes teeming with "early Middle Ages".
However I can't easily make a comparison with the Old since the pdf format is different, while the New textual, allows search, the Old is made of scans and can't search words in it.