L'insulto é l'arma del debole.
Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every...
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.
I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop...
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...
The Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an i...
When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.
No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried i...
I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family th...
Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word 'punctilious' ('at...
In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not news at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterl...
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.
I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no righ...
Semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.
Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected)...
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.
Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: That’s not writing, it’s typing? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and does...
Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers' marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to...
Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.