In its early usage the semicolon served as a pause twice as long as a comma, and half as long as a colon. Eventually an adjustment in usage became identified by grammarians. In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson explains: The semicolon had been transformed. Before the 1800s, it had been a pause. By the early 1800s, grammarians …
Apart from the utilitarian conformity for printers of having common symbols and forms of expression for their productions, grammar became in the eighteenth and nineteenth century a science, a common shared body of knowledge. It also became a science in terms of individuals who sought to popularise systems of their own devising, the use of …
Cecelia Watson, in her book Semicolon, references some innovations in punctuation that did not catch on. An example is the punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark. Using the symbol of a reversed question mark, it indicated that the question it preceded was rhetorical in intent. In a piece of writing that I enjoyed, Watson descriptively …
You can’t use this for Scrabble, but here is a Japanese word for comfort eating.
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