It’s not just for punctuation anymore. This blog post from Lingua Franca is making the buzz rounds among all the Twitter word geeky types. The punctuation mark “/” , used in constructions like “My professor/mentor” has taken the unlikely path (in this shortening era of “ur” and “gtg”) of evolving into a written-out conjunction, “slash,” used in a range of constructions. Read the article for examples.
“The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. “
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