Ever wonder how period went from being a punctuation mark to an adverb? Or when, exactly, dot dot dot became a verb? LSA’s Anne Curzan explores these and other punctuation quandaries in a recent edition of “Lingua Franca,” a column about language and writing in The Chronicle of Education.
Curzan, associate dean for the humanities at LSA and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English, Linguistics, and Education, tracks the use of such terms as period, ellipsis, and quote unquote on Twitter. She also digs back in time to find earlier examples of punctuation marks as words, and she speculates on the future of comma.
Click here for more from Anne Curzan on the changing lives of punctuation marks.
