British book chain Waterstone’s Waterstones has dropped the apostrophe from its name, despite the fact that the company was started by someone with the last name Waterstone. The company has decided that keeping the apostrophe in the name is no longer practical in the age of digital communication. End of an error: Why it’s OK [...]
The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a nice post on whether you are supposed to have a space between the value and the unit when talking about digital storage. For example, do you write 250GB or 250 GB (or 1.44MB vs 1.44 MB if you’re old school). It turns out that the correct answer is to [...]
What most people know as the hash or pound symbol is in fact called the octothorpe. The punctuation mark previously best known for its place on touch tone phones has had a renaissance over the past few years thanks to twitter. But where did the octothorpe come from, and what’s with the name? Robert Fulford [...]
This is a post from a grammar blog detailing the history of the name for the little dot at the end of a sentence. In North America it is usually referred to as a period, while in the United Kingdom it is called a full stop. Stop signs
This one comes from across the pond in England: education secretary Michael Gove recently released a document to the House of Commons that was filled with spelling and punctuation mistakes. Apparently the 10 page document only had 16 periods. Members of Parliament noticed the mistakes, and confronted Gove, who only had this to say: “All [...]
