“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 ...

From love points to friendly periods, these punctuation marks speak volumes about how we approach — or have yet to embrace — communication.

One of the difficulties about punctuation is that a lot of it is down to personal preference or “style”. And that isn’t just a recent thing, to be blamed on textspeak and the belief that the world is ...

Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed. Keith Houston tells their story. In the 1930s and ’40s, ...