It’s time to come out of the closet, all you lovers of classic punctuation! You may have noticed that posts on this blog tend to be ‘properly’ punctuated. Not pun-ctuated, punc’tuated, or punct’d. Why is this important (to me)? Why even mention it?
First off, because it seems that a humble and quite funny book(1) on grammar has caused a rather heated debate. Opposing camps are self-righteously defending their own points of view – about punctuation.
This war of words, literally, began over – of all things – a comma; the Oxford comma, to be precise. That’s the comma used in lists such as this: Aristotle, Confucius, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Mencius, Plato, and Socrates are important names in the history of philosophy.
The Oxford comma is the last one before the word ‘and’ in that last sentence. This is what I was referring to in the first paragraph of this post; for a list to be properly punctuated, of course, means using the Oxford comma! [Unless you’re against the use of the Oxford comma, in which case you may want to skip any lists that I include in my posts!]
And the second reason for this post today is because it’s… April Fool’s Day! The perfect opportunity to refer to a book that I thought was hilarious ‘-) This one: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss; https://www.lynnetruss.com/books/eats-shoots-leaves/
Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Stumped by the semicolon? Join Lynne Truss on a hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation that is sure to sort the dashes from the hyphens. We all had the basic rules of punctuation drilled into us at school, but punctuation pedants have good reason to suspect they never sank in.
Its Summer!’ screams a sign that sets our teeth on edge. ‘Pansy’s ready’, we learn to our considerable interest (‘Is she?’) as we browse among the bedding plants.
Happy April Fool’s Day, everyone – Enjoy this message, from one of my favourite fridge magnets ‘-)
