Today (Sept. 24) is National Punctuation Day — at least, according to the people who run NationalPunctuationDay.com. It’s the sixth annual, and they’re ready to celebrate — with a baking contest.
Yes, “hold on to your oven mitts,” they say, download the official recipe for Punctuation Meat Loaf (pdf), shape it into the form of a punctuation mark, send in some before-and-after pictures, and you could win a T-shirt.
Unfortunately, as Amy commented, some of the meat loaf pictures look as if they came out of someone’s colon.
Anyway, for a pretty good brief history of the evolution of punctuation, I really enjoyed this article on About.com, especially this bit at the end:
Countless style guides have spelled out conventions for using the various marks–but they don’t always agree. In modern prose, dashes are in; semicolons are out. Apostrophes are tossed around like confetti, and quotation marks are commonly dropped at random on the most innocent words and phrases.
And so it remains true, as G. V. Carey observed decades ago, that punctuation is governed “two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste.”
Despite that, I see tons of people who use punctuation as if it were still the Middle Ages: ie. willy nilly.
Businesses, in particular, should pay particular attention to good grammar. Too often, I see poorly-spelled or -punctuated signs, and it doesn’t leave me with a very good impression of the business. Except, actually, for those times when I think to myself, “Wow, a store run by uneducated rubes! I’ll surely be able to baffle their salesclerks and arrange myself a deal!”
Today’s a good day to highlight these blogs:
At any rate, I know it’s a silly made-up holiday, but I fully support National Punctuation Day.
Grant Hamilton
One Response to “To-day is Nat’l Punctuation Day … celebrate! With meatloaf?”
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When Grant and I first went out to restaurants, I found it kind of odd that he would take more time looking at the spelling and grammar mistakes in the menu than deciding what to eat. It’s kind of surprising how most restaurants are lazy about their menu, and don’t use spell check or have someone look it over.
This is what I should use my education for. Hah.