“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 ...

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase. To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital ...

When reading a classic book, we tend to pay attention to the themes, the characters, and the story. We say the words aloud. We notice everything, in fact, except for one crucial thing: the punctuation ...

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 nothing sacred anymore? Now we can’t even text — text, the thing millennials practically invented on T9 keyboards — without being called out by Gen Z. The generation who banned skinny jeans and ...