In school, I was taught about conjunctions (e.g. or and and) and the role they play in sentence structure – they are linking words. They do what they say on the tin: con-(i.e. with) and -junction (i.e ...

If you’re looking for a grammatical convention guaranteed to spark an unnecessarily outraged debate, look no further than the Oxford comma [Editor’s note: I don’t know that I’d call it unnecessary].

Editor’s Note: John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy and music history at Columbia University and is the author of “Words on the Move.” The opinions expressed in this ...

You’ve probably seen these two little dots, one on top of the other, scattered throughout your reading material. But do you really know what they’re used for? The colon is not something that shows up ...