Monthly archive - July 2019

In the delightful Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson, a historian and philosopher of science, takes readers through a lively and varied "biography" of the semicolon.  Read more

By the end of the 1950s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Age of classic British mystery fiction was completely done. The breezy puzzles of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh had been overtaken by hardboiled detectives, psychological thrillers, mean streets, twisted characters, and plots that examined the underbelly of human behavior.

When Lynne Truss wrote, in her best-selling 2003 grammar screed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, of "a world of plummeting punctuation standards," she was (perhaps unwittingly) joining an ancient tradition. How long, exactly, have shortsighted curmudgeons been bemoaning the poor grammar of the generations that follow theirs?  Read more