While writing about military ranks last week, I wondered if the word colony, which I’d touched on briefly the week before, was related to the word column, from whose Italian translation the word colonel comes from.
My mind then thought of other words, like colony and colon: maybe they could be related too. Colony, maybe that comes from the Latin for column, columna, because it originally referred to a garrison town, where a column of soldiers were stationed. That sounds plausible, doesn’t it?
Told you.
This is probably the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks in the English language. What exactly is it, and what does it do?
First of all, it’s clearly a combination of a comma (,) and a colon (:).
A comma is used to separate elements of a sentence, such as items in a list, or clauses (a clause, generally, is a part of a sentence with its own sentence and verb). Most people use commas correctly without thinking about it, and the rules about them aren’t really strict anyway. Basically, you can use in a comma in a sentence where you would pause if you were speaking. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 