Chrysti the Wordsmith > Radio Scripts

When conditions are right on certain summer days, you might see thin streaks of mist slanting away from the bottom of a cloud formation. These wisps are raindrops evaporating on their freefall between cloud and earth.

Meteorologists call this phenomenon virga. The term comes from a group of Latin words meaning "rod, twig, walking cane, or staff." In a visual and linguistic metaphor, the meteorological virga extends rod-like from its parent cloud.

Take this same slanting-line motif to paper, and you have a virgule, known generically as a slash or slant. This oblique punctuation rod offers a choice between the words it separates. For example, the virgule is the mark between him/her and his/hers, which indicates the writer is neutral with regard to gender. A virgule separates parts of an extended date as well, as in "the winter of 1887/88." It's also the mark that represents the word per in $1.98/lb.

When recording poetry in a narrative, writers use a virgule to separate the lines of verse, for example in the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, the lines read "the woods are lovely, dark and deep/but I have promises to keep/" with a virgule appearing after deep and keep to indicate line breaks.

Radio Script > Virga/Virgule