Oh yes, sir. There's no doubt about it, sir.The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.
Come inside, it says, for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.
There used to be a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come in to complain, and he would then talk them in...
One might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-taskin...
She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can't lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is upon her to see it in a different place.
If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons
Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. Phrase...
We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first p...
Thurber was asked by a correspondent: Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'? And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said abo...
The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getti...
So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs a...
Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation m...
No valentines from the cats again.
In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit b...
If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
If we looked inside ourselves and remembered how insignificant we are, just for a couple of minutes a day, respect for other people would be an automatic result.
For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word Book’s with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accel...
Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of The Lord of the Rings. You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.
Fulcrum