National Punctuation Day
Under Who Knew, or maybe under Who Cares, comes something I got in my e-mail from A Word a Day:
Nine out of ten emails seem to contain at least one typographical error,
better known as a typo. Never before have so many words been mangled. Is
it caused by carelessness, keyboard clumsiness, or just plain ignorance?
The U.S. will celebrate its fourth annual National Punctuation Day on
September 24. Let’s make it a worldwide affair, when we name and shame
offenders, and return faulty emails to their senders, with mistakes
highlighted in red. More about this in The World’s First Multi-National
e-Book: http://www.bdb.co.za/shackle/articles/world_punctuation_day.htm
And a question. In blogs, I can see that punctuation marks are used in informal Arabic usage, but when someone is writing in classical Arabic, do they use the same punctuation (like periods, exclamation points, quotation marks?)
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PLEASE don’t send my e-mails back with errors highlighted in red 🙂 I know I hurry and make many punctuation errors; most often in omitting capitalization or running sentences together with …. or —-. Mea culpa. In honor of this day, I will try to reform (for the day, at least)!
Yeah, it’s used in formal Arabic in the first place.. bas people tend to misuse them all the time- we bloggers overlook 🙂
Never! Never, dearest Grammy, your letters are precious to me! And I am all too aware of my own shortcomings in the punctuation realm, like using more than one exclamation point, and overuse us exclamation point . . . . arrgh!
Chikapappi – we bloggers are a big punctuation problem! 😉
Thats the most idiotic thing i ever heard ! i wonder how many % of people in the US speak/write other languages than English ?
I make a lot of mistakes in English because its not my first language and also because may i am dumb and not good at it. Or is it because i know to write in 4 languages, and speak 6 ? .
I’m switching to French or Spanish ,Cz this is pure language racism! lol
GreY – you would die laughing if you could read when I write in Arabic. I write like a five year old child. Five year olds love me!
What a day! I never imagined there would be such a national day but that is wonderful. In classical Arabic punctuation is used, in more or less the same way as in English. There might only be a few differences that can’t seem to come to mind at the moment!
National punctuation day? I had no idea—I mean, no idea—that such a holiday was celebrated; that it even existed! I suppose it’s important: a little pet peeve (insert geek laugh here) has always been the proper use of the em-dash & the en-dash.
There. I think I that’s all of them.
I know, N., whooda thunk it? 😉
Hearto – I am really bad with punctuation – when I learned keyboarding, I was taught to put two spaces after every period; later I was told that usage had changed, now it is only one. And I think that is key – just as with language (who uses “fewer” rather than “less” these days?) – things change. Huh? What’s that you say? em-dash & en-dash??? Unnecessary quote marks?? More than one question mark? ? ? LLLLOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL