Slash: No Longer Just a Punctuation Mark

[Ursa major]

Just wait until you hear me pronounce plaaaastic.









(But to be fair, I've never heard anyone say that they're going for a solidus. )

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Everybody says dot com. Nobody writes n dash not true comma one only writes it out to make it clear it has been vocalised period new paragraph

When I attempted open parentheses without any great success close parentheses to master a dictation program I succeeded in getting it to recognise words such as open quotation marks comma close quotation marks or open quotation marks period close quotation marks comma even when more meaningful words were being scrambled period new paragraph

Could it be that the very simplicity of the open quotation marks punctuation close quotation marks concepts reassures that at least italics that close italic information will get across question mark

That is impressive, Chrispy!

Actually I wonder if there might be some MMORPG influence, as I could see my son typing "does anyone have any this slash that" for whatever he's looking for in Minecraft -- and using an actual slash makes a command that is invisible, of course.

I have actually used the word "slash" in spoken sentences, but I would never type it that way -- that would seem stupid, given the "trading one character for five" reasoning. More often, I just skip it entirely if I'm reading something aloud that has a slash in it.

My husband says "period end of sentence", but fortunately not for all of them, or I would have ended his sentence years ago -- and started my own, maximum security.

 

[Vertigo]

Here's an interesting one then.

Many have said why type 'slash' when all you need to type is '/'.

However, how many of you type 'and' instead of '&'? Okay not as many characters but much the same thing. I know in older books I often see '&' used instead of 'and' but never in newer books, except maybe in titles and such like.

 

[The Judge]

Because "and" came first and was never wholly superceded, perhaps. And the symbol is an abbreviation/shorthand version of the full word, not the word itself, as it were.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary

ampersand (n.) 1837, contraction of and per se and, meaning "(the character) '&' by itself is 'and' " (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). The symbol is based on the Latin word et "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures), attested in Pompeiian graffiti, but not (as sometimes stated) from the Tironian Notes, which was a different form of shorthand, probably invented by Cicero's companion Marcus Tullius Tiro, which used a different symbol, something like a reversed capital gamma, to indicate et.

This Tironian symbol was maintained by some medieval scribes, including Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, who sprinkled their works with a symbol like a numeral 7 to indicate the word and. In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."

 

[Vertigo]

You may be right TJ but it is interesting all the same that we already have an abbreviation for a word but it is not commonly used, at least in prose, and indeed seems less used now than it used to be.

So I could still see the slash evolving into an accepted conjunction word. Though probably not in my lifetime

 

[Lenny]

Another blogger for Lingua Franca has posted a follow-up, which delves into classical logic to argue that the term "conjunction" is confusing. Instead, words such as "and", "but", and "slash" should be termed coordinators.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/04/30/being-a-coordinator/

One of the links in the follow-up is to a 2010 blog post about "slash" and "cum" being possibly classed as conjunctions, and definitely as coordinators. It also notes that "slash" was already listed by The American Heritage Dictionary as a conjunction.

http://english-jack.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/slash-and-cum-coordinators.html

(And there was a follow-up post to the 2010 post, which dealt with classifications: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2584)

 

[Ursa major]

That's something entirely different to the use of words, the creation of neologisms and adding new meanings to old words, Lenny. I'm tempted to say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Parts of speech () might change over time - well, they do - but trying to change the names for them seems rather pointless, unless one has lots of time on one's hands, a need for a research proposal to scoop up a research grant, or both. Very few people outside of academia are going to take any notice, unless they're parents who find their children's homework mentions coordinators but not conjunctions.

 

[hopewrites]

someone will have to rewrite this song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODGA7ssL-6g

 

[Alex The G and T]

Not much more annoying than people who say "Quote-End quote" together before they actually state the quote. Or those ditzy claw-finger air quotes.

On a side note. I love Conan Obrian for using an image of the musician "Slash" when he puts an URL onscreen.