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...
The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. Th...
That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlema...
Once someone has shown you a convincingly different way of looking at the world, it's hard to remember how you saw it before.
It used to be just CIA agents with ear-pieces who walked round with preoccupied, faraway expressions, and consequently regarded all the little people as irrelevant scum. Now, understandably, it's near...
As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has be...
Pretentious and over-active semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.
Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.
Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with.
Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining ch...
In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance,...
For the first time since she met him, she asked herself whether mr Dodgson was really the sunny personality she had at first imagined. Did she honestly want to spend the rest of her life with him, set...
As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to...
We are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
We may curse our bad luck that it's sounds like its; who's sounds like whose; they're sounds like their (and their); there's sounds like theirs; and you're sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups wh...
There is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line Hey! It's uncool to be stupid! - which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire th...
Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on arou...
On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.
I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying Giant Kid's Playground, and then wonder why...