One night last week, I explained to a youthful hotel desk clerk that my family and I were interested in playing cards up in our room, then asked her if the hotel had a deck. She made this sound:. Then ...

Pain interjections can indeed be traced back to nonlinguistic vocalisations. We all know what words we might shout out when we stub a toe or touch something hot. For those of us who speak English, ...

The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument with a colleague about punctuation, a school ...