It's National Punctuation Day! Let's Celebrate

My good friend Kathy* reminded me that yesterday was National Punctuation Day.

So, a belated good wishes to you all.
It was an auspicious day; I hope you were able to make the most of it.

You may be thinking, “How on earth would I celebrate a day intended to honor punctuation?”
We could send one another flowers, though I don’t think there is a rose varietal named ‘Blushing Apostrophe.’

I was thinking—yes, I do think on occasion—that we could all vow to use as many punctuation marks as possible.

There is a surprisingly long list of punctuation marks; I (well . . . I got a member of my staff to help me think [OK, OK, sometime I need help thinking] of some of them) came up with the following:
period
comma
exclamation mark
question mark
double quotation marks
single quotation marks
colon
semicolon
apostrophe
hyphen
en dash
em dash
ellipsis/ellipses
slash/solidus
parentheses
brackets
asterisk

You can do it!

My staffer and I decided that the “@” symbol isn’t really punctuation, though in our e-mail–centric world, maybe it is becoming punctuation when used in e-mail addresses.


*a college-era buddy of mine, she is also of the copyeditor persuasion

Compound Punctuation

A colleague to whom I also sent the above message just replied, and added a smilie:

:-) is that a punctuation mark?

she asked.

I told her I think those are compound punctuation.

Let's Get Cracking!


In today's funnies, a comic about revising the dictionary

http://www.comics.com/wash/pickles/archive/pickles-20080908.html


Get busy out there, using up all those old words.

The Girl has made a good stab at it--she had to write and turn in "a piece of polished prose," and I think she misread "polished" for "purple." She got the thesaurus out. 

Now it's your turn to do your part. What old word have you used recently?

If I Were Only Brave Enough . . . 

We need to tighten the credit style on my magazine; more stuff is appearing on page.

We're toying w/ using the Blueprint style: If the company name and the URL are the same, drop the company name and keep the URL.

But the all-lower-case style makes URLs hard to read.

I'm SO tempted to change a listing like:

Flower girl's dresses, Morgane Le Fay, morganelefay.com

to:

Flower girl's dresses, MorganeLeFay.com.

How stupid would that be?

I know that most pubs put URLs in all lower-case, because the browser doesn't need them. But it also doesn't CARE, right? 

And if the capital letters make comprehension easier, and keep readers from trying to read a broken URL as an actual word, then wouldn't the initial caps be a sensible idea?

Tell me what you think.

(edited to fix a typo--thanks, Tony)