“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 ...

With dialogue, specific punctuation is needed. Most often, commas and periods go within the quotation marks, but there are some forms of punctuation and examples that go outside of the quotation marks ...

“Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,” a report by the language-learning website Babbel proclaimed in May. (HT Illustration: Puneet Kumar) Their ...