Sentence me to ten lashes with a wet exclamation point! September 24th was National Punctuation Day and I let it slip by without even pausing (like a comma) to mark the occasion.
How does one celebrate such a festive event? According to the “National Punctuation Day” web site, you start by getting up late, taking a long shower, going out for coffee and bagels then reading the paper and circling all the punctuation errors you find. Too late for me to do that, but I did take them up on one of their tips and had a leisurely stroll past my town’s storefronts, noting all the signs with incorrect punctuation. Here are two I found at a single fish shop:
“Todays Special: Buy 2lbs. Shrimp, Get 1lb. Free”
“Voted Best on Long Island by News 12 and The New York Times Thank You! Long Island”
They also recommend you stop in the store and correct the owner. Er, no. I’ve seen the guy who runs that shop and I’d rather not find myself sleeping with the fishes.
Frankly, once the age of texting and tweeting dawned, I gave up correcting people’s punctuation, or lack thereof. It’s too exhausting. If people want to pile up words like bricks, without the structural cement of periods, commas, colons and the like, I’m not going to waste my time helping them turn rubble into writing.
I do have one punctilious pet peeve and that’s the overuse of exclamation points and question marks. Exclamation points are like cayenne pepper and should be used not only sparingly but one pinch at a time. It’s “Congratulations!” never “Congratulations!!!!!” The same restraint holds true for question marks. Typing several of these symbols doesn’t make you appear more excited or quizzical, just a hot mess.
For those of you who think the subject of punctuation is as dry as day-old toast, the book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” should change your mind. Written by Lynn Truss, an English author whose style is ruthlessly funny, this tome became a surprising sensation in the publishing world, spending weeks on bestseller lists. In fact, the title itself is based on a cheeky story about bad punctuation:
A panda walks into a cafe, orders a sandwich, eats it, then pulls out a gun and unloads it on the other patrons. When the horrified owner asks “Why?” as the panda heads towards the exit, he tosses a badly written wildlife brochure over his shoulder. It reads, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Ta da!
Next year, I won’t be so remiss and plan to whoop it up on “National Punctuation Day” by wearing something dashing, scheduling a colonoscopy, hanging a pair of wall brackets, watching a lunar ellipsis then falling into a deep comma. Period.
Hee-larious post my dear! (sorry I can't stop punctuating my online missives with dashes...I think it stems from reading too much Kerouac or Hunter Thompson...)
ReplyDeleteI don't want to play punctuation policewoman, but I the mark you're referring to (and displaying) is an ellipsis (...).
ReplyDeleteNo worries. Like music, a writer needs to establish a rhythm for their work. But I still stand by my objection to the overuse of exclamation points and question marks. That just plain sloppy.