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.