We were watching the excellent Lesley Manville in the film Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022) the other night, and I found myself mildly irritated by the punctuation of the title. (This sort of thing happens to me—it’s a curse.) The film is based on a book by Paul Gallico, Mrs. ’Arris Goes To Paris … Continue reading Abbreviation & Contraction
Tag Archives: Punctuation
Apostrophe: Part 1
əˈpɒstrəfiː apostrophe: 1) A rhetorical device in which the speaker breaks off from discourse in order to address a person or thing, absent or present; 2) The sign ’, used to indicate omitted letters, or the possessive case [I]t appears from the evidence that there was never a golden age in which the rules for … Continue reading Apostrophe: Part 1
Quotation Marks
The quotation mark has its origin in Europe in the centuries before printing, when documents were copied by hand. It started out as something called a diple. That word comes from Greek diplous, “double”, and a diple was, at its simplest, a line bent in half to form an arrowhead, like this: >. Diples were … Continue reading Quotation Marks