To the point

I’m on another punctuation rant. “Punk chu a shun.” What a weird word. It must be originally from Latin. There are not a lot of words that begin with “punc,” which is good because it doesn’t look or sound pretty. Punctual, punctuation, punctilious. What a perfectly silly word! “Punctilious,” is one of those words that just makes you laugh for the absurdity of it.

punc til i ous n. 1. attentive to the finer points of etiquette and formal conduct. 2. precise; scrupulous. See synonyms at meticulous. From New Latin, punctum, point.
punc tu al adj. Prompt, arriving at the time appointed; exact, precise.
punc tu ate v. 1. to provide a test with punctuation marks. 2. to interrupt periodically. 3. to stress, emphasize.

I realize I may be one of the few people in the world who knows how to use punctuation. I know what a semicolon is for. I don’t much care for them. I prefer exclamation points! I’m quite liberal with periods and question marks. On the other hand I’m very conservative with quotation marks. I think a paragraph filled with them is quite annoying and unattractive. I prefer using a name or title and a colon on each line of a conversation (see Sexist Terms for an example). I like parentheses for the most part. I really enjoy ellipses… those are the three dots which indicate a pregnant pause… or a missing word or phrase.

I told my son that “ain’t” wasn’t a proper word. Then of course a song came on the radio with double negatives and the aforementioned term, “ain’t.” It is much more common here than it was in New York.

I pride myself on knowing the rules. But they keep changing them! I feel like an anachronism.

anachronism n. anything out of its proper time. From Greek, ana, backward, chronos, time.

Okay, here's the conclusion. There must be some relationship between the top of this article and the bottom. I'll try to tie in punctuation with anachronism: You never hear much about punctiliousness these days. I guess it's anachronistic to be concerned with propriety or punctuation in today's informal society.

Rantings (NOT Ranting's)

Apostrophes are appearing everywhere lately. Especially where they don’t belong. I receive electronic mail messages with errors in them all the time. Should we do away with apostrophes? Apostrophe! PH, must be Greek. We can say the book belonging to the boy, instead of the boy’s book. Apostrophes show ownership. The problem is rooted in the difference between its and it’s. Apostrophes are used for contractions (shortened forms). They used to call them "contractions" when I was in school. The educational system thinks it is beneficial to change the names taught to children. The material is the same, but something like "carrying" is now called "regrouping." For parents who had trouble with mathematical concepts in elementary school this only serves to make it impossible for parents to assist their children in doing homework. I don't think it really makes mathematics any easier. And tell me what happened to the word "arithmetic?"

But back to apostrophes. “Its” means belonging to it. "It’s" is a shortened form of it is. And now that acronyms are so popular we want to write the plural of PC as PC’s. Plurals of common capitalized abbreviations are supposed to require an apostrophe. Maybe it should be PCs for several personal computers and PC’s for belonging to the PC. Maybe we should bring back periods. PERIODS, not "dots!" Remember P.C.? Or better yet, forget capitals and punctuation altogether and adopt the style of e. e. cummings. Wonder why he used periods in his name, but not in his poetry? I think chaos would break loose though if we did that. Maybe a few superfluous apostrophes are a small price to pay for world order.

Nevermind. Apostrophes may be overused or incorrectly used, but except for that, all is right with the world.