RADZI CHINYANGANYA: This is Manchester Central Library which is home to over half a million books and books are amazing things. With words alone they can take you to a new fantasy world or perhaps ...

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Word, word, word, word, word, punctuation mark. This is how we read. Sometimes there are more words, ...

SOME British readers might wonder why a London-based publication uses double inverted commas like "these". And some American readers may wonder why commas and full stops (er, periods) sometimes appear ...

AS THE question implies, to describe quotation marks as inverted commas is only half true. The reason is that printed characters have evolved from hand scripts. If you draw curved quotation marks by ...