Grammar-licious!!
I am a
writer. I may have mentioned that a time or thirty. But, on
the off chance you weren’t paying attention, I am a writer.
I’m not a
successful writer. Hell, I’m not even saying I’m a good
writer. But writing is pretty much the one thing I do that
comes close to being work. And I do want to be a
successful/good writer. And I think that counts toward
something, doesn’t it? I mean, I do laundry too, which is
close to work. But I do a fairly crappy job at it, and I
don’t care.
So to the
end of wanting to "be" a writer, I do actually try to follow
grammar rules and use proper punctuation and all that crap.
(A fact which I insist is true in spite of what you may have
seen on this website.) But, I think it’s time to revamp some
things in the world of English composition. And, as always,
I’m here to help.
Let’s
look at punctuation marks. Most were created, I believe,
eleventy-thousand years ago, and have remained untouched
since, so maybe it’s time to rework them.
First,
the colon. This “:” little fellow. Get rid of it.
Seriously. It’s useless. People only use it when they put a
list in a paragraph. That list would look like this:
1.
You know what? This is stupid. Just use a damn a
period. Nobody cares.
2.
See #1.
3.
Losing the colon would free up English teachers to
search for more dangling participles. Or as like to call them
– grammar unicorns.
Second. What should also go the way of the colon?
Its retarded cousin, the semi-colon (;).
Third, this “~” thing. I swear, sometimes I think keyboard
manufacturers are just making shit up
I say it’s time to lose those, and replace them with symbols
we actually do need. Here are some punctuation marks that I
think would really come in handy: (< check it
out, a colon!)
“Sassy black girl.” Put this at the end of a sentence in
place of a period or question mark to let the reader know it
should be read with the intonation of a petulant adolescent
girl of African descent. Maybe you could put it at the
beginning of the sentence, like that upside-down Mexican
question mark thingy.
“Sarcasm.” Come on. I can’t believe someone hasn’t come up
with this already. Perhaps we could use that little smiley
that is rolling his eyes for this one.
“Sarcasm that the intended recipient doesn’t catch but that
everyone else fully understood.” This comes up a lot more
often than you’d think. Primarily because people are a lot
dumber than you’d think. Scary, isn’t it?
“Saying that you give in or agree with someone when you
actually don’t or just have stopped giving a crap and you are
just saying yes in the hopes that person will shut up and
leave already.” This has a lot of potential in business
writing.
“Holy crap, a midget!” Because it’s rude to just come right
out and say it. I have a lot of stories where one character
is trying to get another character to turn around because a
whole bunch of midgets in spandex just walked into the
goddamned bar. I might be watching too much midget wrestling.
We do need to be careful, though. We don’t want to get rid of
any marks that are just biding their time. Like the “@” which
was nothing before email came along. Or the “&,” which is
common today, but was shunned originally when it was forced
into use by Gottfried Amper in the late 15th
century. Amper was a printer’s assistance in Germany when he
improperly forged an “8” and, given the time and money that
went into forging things back then, rather than throw it away,
he started using it as shorthand in some smaller printings.
When one client questioned the printer as to just what the
hell that symbol was doing in his treatise on taxation and the
burden of the working class, the printer stated, “Oh, that’s
Amper’s and.”
Get it?
Sorry about that.
On a side note, to get the right century for that b.s. about
the ampersand, I Googled “Gutenberg bible.” Which made me
wonder – is there any relation to Steve Gutenberg? Does he
get a cut every time someone buys a bible? That would be
weird.
Wow. I just wrote 700 words on punctuation. This will surely
go down as one of my most riveting columns ever.