By Selwyn Duke

You don’t have to be a linguist to grasp that language use tells us much about a society — and this goes far beyond whether vulgarity is accepted. One man who might agree is columnist John Kelly. Lamenting how even journalists and people creating product packaging today don’t measure up to a 1950s Catholic-grammar-school graduate, he writes in a Sunday title, “You can quote me: ‘Doesn’t anybody know how to use punctuation any more?’”

Of course, concern over boys and girls no longer learning proper punctuation may seem trivial in a society in which many people no longer know what boys and girls are. But what if this phenomenon reflects the precise reason, or at least part of it, why we witness the civilizational decay evident all around us?

Read the rest here.