“People don’t know why they get so upset about language,” David Crystal told me recently, over Skype from his home in Wales. “ ‘Potato’s,’ with an apostrophe ‘S,’ ” he offered, as an example of the ...

Crystal (Spell It Out) will delight anyone interested in written language with this exploration and explication of English’s deceptively complex system of punctuation. Rather than trying to convey how ...

Is a full stop really worth four commas? And should everybody avoid the semi-colon? This book from the popular linguist David Crystal will amuse and instruct A couple of weeks ago I saw David Crystal ...

Word, word, word, word, word, punctuation mark. This is how we read. Sometimes there are more words, or fewer. Occasionally additional marks—commas, em-dashes—enter the mix. But that’s pretty much how ...

Punctuation is a set of specific marks or symbols that we used to express the meaning of our sentences clearly and to make the flow of the text smooth. It shows us where we need to pause, it separates ...

“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May. (HT Illustration: Puneet Kumar) Their ...