“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 ...

Do you really need punctuation, spell-check and proper grammar when chatting with AI? I’ve tested how being polite alters response, so I just had to know if the tone and content of chatbot replies ...

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 ...

Are you manic about misplaced commas? Apoplectic over rogue apostrophes? Distressed by the disappearing question mark? You don’t have to be an outspoken member of the punctuation police to know the ...

Commas, semicolons and question marks are so commonplace it seems as if they were always there – but that’s not the case. Keith Houston explains their history. As readers and writers, we’re intimately ...

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction ...

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 ...