Happy National Punctuation Day, Inkpotters!

This is a beautiful day. Punctuation is what separates us from the animals. Just try to get a monkey to use a hyphen correctly. Don’t even get me started on the semi-colons.

Go to the website and you can read all about your faithful friends, the punctuation marks. You can get the recipe for the Official Meat Loaf of National Punctuation Day. Normally I would question their use of the exclamation point there, but is some cases a little exuberance is warranted, especially when it comes to meatloaf. And–oh, is it my birthday?–there is a punctuation Haiku contest. There is also merchandise, with clever punctuation puns like “A semi-colon is not a surgical procedure,” and “Jesus and the twelve apostrophes.” (“Man,” Jesus said. “Can you guys stop being so possessive?”)

In celebration I am making my annual vow to stop abusing the poor em dashes–who have really done nothing to deserve what I do to them. And I am trailing off with ellipses, elaborating with semi-colons, scattering commas like breadcrumbs. I shall hug my words with parenthesis and put a firm period at the end of my day. For life is not a paragraph, my friends, but at least it can be well-punctuated.