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can you be “electrified” by a slam dunk victory?

I PUT DOWN MY MUG OF COFFEE and reached into my desk drawer and dex­ter­ously pulled out my minia­ture samurai-sword letter-opener with the dropbear-tooth handle. After staring into space for a few sec­onds and mum­bling, “That’s not a knife—this is a knife,” I took a few swipes in front of me with the foot-long blade, voicing the ap­pro­priate martial-arts-movie swooshing-sounds as it cut the air. [Read more] “can you be “electrified” by a slam dunk victory?”

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the hyphen/forward-slash conundrum resolved

MY PRE­VIOUS AR­TICLE ON DASHES was ti­tled “On Those Pesky Dashes As Punc­tu­a­tion Marks” and ad­dressed the em-dash (—), the en-dash (–), and the hy­phen (-). It should have in­cluded some sug­ges­tions on the proper use of the for­ward leaning slash (/). After all, graph­i­cally the forward-slash, or vir­gule, is just an up­right, slanted dash! [Read more] “the hyphen/forward-slash conundrum resolved”

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on those pesky dashes as punctuation marks

USE OF THE DASH FOR PUNC­TU­A­TION is a lost art in con­tem­po­rary Amer­ican Eng­lish (AmE) and British Eng­lish (BrE) for many writers and ap­par­ently many type­set­ters. It’s a shame, as a well-placed dash or ten can ease the flow of reading and there­fore lead to in­creased un­der­standing and plea­sure. [Read more] “on those pesky dashes as punctuation marks”

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grammar girl on grammar myths

FELLOW FORMER KINGSTONIAN Steve Frank posted a link on my Face­book page to an ar­ticle ti­tled “Top 10 Grammar Myths” by Mignon Fog­arty (aka Grammar Girl) on the Mental Floss web­site. Steve fol­lows my Strunk­and­whitenit! cat­e­gory and knew that this piece would in­terest me—and it does! [Read more] “grammar girl on grammar myths”