Tag: linguistics

Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. 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.

Slash – The Chronicle of Higher Education

I don’t know if I count as young here, but I use this all the time. Seems to obviously be an outgrowth of the use of the slash in academic discourses, spilling downward. Because where else is the slash regularized in everyday language?