Thursday, September 25, 2008

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.

4 comments:

Editrix said...

There IS something called the "comma butterfly": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_Butterfly

Maybe next year we could e-mail pictures of them to our editor friends to mark the occasion.

TootsNYC said...

Love it!

or, we can make cakes using the comma cake pan.

http://www.countrykitchensa.com/catalog/product.aspx?T=1&productId=632572


I am SO seriously thinking of buying at least the 8" one. Then I can make:

apostrophes
commas
semicolons (bcs I already have an 8" round pan!

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