My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

P
UNCTUATION
:
THE VIRTUE OF THE BORED
?
Actually, Evelyn Waugh said that punctuality was the virtue of the bored, but he
doesn’t  seem  to  have  said  anything  witty  about  punctuation,
*39
 so  we  thought
we’d just paraphrase him.
Punctuation  can  be  defined  as  ‘the  act,  practice  or  system  of  using  certain
standardized marks and signs in writing and printing’, and punctuation marks are
symbols  that  are  used  in  sentences  and  phrases  to  make  their  meaning  clearer.
Those most commonly used in English are the full stop (.), comma (,), question
mark  (?),  exclamation  mark  (!),  semi-colon  (;),  colon  (:),  apostrophe  (’)  and
quotation marks or inverted commas (‘ ’ or “ ”).
Swot’s Corner: Punctuation existed in Greek texts from at least the fourth
century BC, although Greek and Latin scribes rarely used more than two marks,
the equivalent of the full stop and the comma.