If you really want to demonstrate your dislike for someone, end a sentence with a period. "Thanks so much." "That's great." "Happy birthday." As a line in an email, a text or a Facebook comment, any ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

As we gathered punctuation favorites from a range of our favorite writers, novelists, and word-knowledgable people, we ran into a cold, hard fact. Some punctuation marks were hated, perhaps none more ...

I’m meeting my friend Nick for dinner downtown. At 6:30, I feel that cell-phone-sized hum in my pocket, the sensation these days of incoming language. A text from Nick: “Running 10 mins late.” After ...

It was a query born of laziness. I was editing a business proposal for a company that has an exclamation point at the end of its name, like Yahoo! but it’s not Yahoo! The company name came up multiple ...

FAIRBANKS — Lewis Thomas, who died in 1993, is remembered as a physician, medical researcher, dean of the Yale and New York University medical schools, science essayist and poet, and as an etymologist ...

Hello! Friends! The modern English language is a combination of a large number of words, marks, and special symbols. However, a few marks afford to attain the position enjoyed by the exclamation mark!

If there is any feeling to be found in the joyless brick of human knowledge that we call the smartphone, certainly, it lives in our punctuation. On a rainy Monday morning, I found myself thinking, as ...

Nicolas Cage has a quiet word with someone down the phone (Picture: Touchstone) We all like shouting out when we’re excited about something. So when it comes to expressing that excitement through the ...

In my many, many years as a Catholic, I have given up many, many things for Lent. As a kid, it was usually Milky Ways. In college, it was usually beer. And as an adult, it was shopping or swearing, ...