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Wilf Popoff

Wasted Words: Recasting Punctuation

June 14, 2016 by Wilf Popoff | 3 Comments on Wasted Words: Recasting Punctuation

I recall Victor Borge’s celebrated skit where he reads a story aloud while sputtering rude noises as punctuation. Borge reasoned that if such detail was vital for a reader’s grasp it was likewise for a listener’s. The Great Dane died before Cyberia’s scribbling and texting mania laid siege to orthodox punctuation, so today his skit would bewilder […]

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Wilf Popoff

Wasted Words: The Origins of Texting

February 9, 2016 by Wilf Popoff | 6 Comments on Wasted Words: The Origins of Texting

Is digital discourse destroying the English language along with civilization? Does texting portend doom? Let’s not be so hasty: I often read letters from the past — for example, the 19th-century correspondence of Bertrand Russell’s family.1 These aristocrats (Russell’s grandfather was twice the British prime minister) habitually took shortcuts in their numerous epistles, presumably to […]

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