It’s National Punctuation Day

Fresh on the heels of the news that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed the hyphens from some 16000 words comes a fantastical announcement: today is officially National Punctuation Day! [Hat tip to Lucinda for the link on the sad fate of all those hyphens. I wonder where they’ll all go?]

The official NPD site is a treasure chest of awesome, from the tips on how to celebrate which include sleeping late and eating a bagel (both of which I did – thanks!), to cooking the official meat loaf of National Punctuation Day – there’s a PDF of the recipe on the main page of that site.

I’m bummed that there aren’t more pictures of bad punctuation in action; do you have any egregious examples near you?

Comments are Closed

  1. tvaddictgurl says:

    I don’t have a picture of bad punctuation but I used to live upstairs from someone that had a sign on their front door that read:

    Please remove you’re shoe’s.

    I lived there for three years and not a day went by that I didn’t want to attack the sign with a red pen.

  2. Heather says:

    I’m a fan of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks:

    http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

    This is a huge offense in my “office.”

  3. harmony says:

    As well as the “blog” that Heather listed (or is that “Heather”?), I also like the Apostrophe Abuse blog:
    http://www.apostropheabuse.com/

  4. Gwen says:

    Any of the “stupid author posts” on Karen Scott’s site.  Those crack me up and the grammar in them, even more so.  That’s the author’s writing, not Karen’s.  She’s generally quite good with her English (pun intended).

    Ironically enough, my spaminator word is “lack79”.

    “tee hee”

    (I’m cracking myself up.)

  5. Wry Hag says:

    Oh! Shit! I missed it! My thought’s were ‘elsewhere’!

    Seriously, though (yeah), I not too long ago posted a blog titled “Blog Homies of the Literati”, in which I couldn’t help but express wonder at how poorly some authors and bookish blogkeepers expressed themselves. (And of course you remember the famous Anne Rice and LKH rants.)

    So, if you’re looking for felonious abuse of the language, look no further than your favorite book or blog. The exercise will probably give you enough double-jointedness to kick your own ass around the block for wasting time and/or money on some of these doofuses.

  6. Carrie Lofty says:

    Some of the most reliable horrors in punctuation come from annoying slogan church signs.

  7. kpsr. says:

    also, signs at the state fair.

    this is a picture I took while I was home in Nebraska on vacation.

    hope the link works.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/15155531@N00/1252774280/in/set-72157601706049977/

  8. Stephanie says:

    OH man!  I was at Best Buy the other day and on one of the display TVs, there was a rotating ad saying something about outfitting your student for college and there was a ridiculously unnecessary comma in it.

    The sentence wasn’t this, but it read like it:

    “Properly outfit, your student for school.”

    I wanted to kill it.

  9. Simba says:

    For many photo’s of my favorite error’s you should visit The Apostrophe Protection Society at http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/index.htm

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