What ever happened to...

Is this a rant ?
What?
How can I tell it’s a question?

🙂



✌🏻

question mark's is a minor annoyance. Its just one more nail in the coffin of good grammar. Maybe George Bernard Shaw was right:

Playwright George Bernard Shaw thought apostrophes were unnecessary and declined to use them in words like don’t, doesn’t, I’ve, that’s, and weren’t. He did use them for words like I’ll and he’ll, where the apostrophe-less version might have caused confusion. He made clear his disdain for the little marks in his Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers, where he said, “There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.” https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87448/6-punctuation-marks-hated-famous-authors

And for what it's worth, Gertrude Stein hated question marks:

Stein...also objected to the question mark, finding it “positively revolting” and of all the punctuation marks “the completely most uninteresting.” There was no reason for it since “a question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing.” ibid

Apostrophes drive me crazy and I still haven't adapted to overlooking their misuse. I really enjoyed grammar in school early on, it's what made it possible for me to get into and through college.

Disdain for punctuation or not, it makes your point clearly to the reader(s) so that they might appreciate what you had to say in the proper light. I think of it as a form of misspelled words.

/revision/latest?cb=20090729102006

punctuation has become too much work for the thumbs

1. posting from phones. "?" key is secondary on phone keyboards, takes two presses.

2. lazyness, don't want to use the shift key, like e. e. cummings, they type in no caps.

I hate texting for that reason. I don't use my thumbs, though.

If I get frustrated with texting, I give up and just call whomever texted me. It's my "fuckit" default.

Obvious commercial spam.

Where's the threads advocating the use of other punctuation?

The humble "," comes to mind with its hegemony on the glorious run-on sentence.

But it wasn't all that helpful.

I never looked for it on DU.

to post. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at my kiddo’s homework and seen glaring punctuation, spelling and grammar errors come home uncorrected from school. I don’t get it.

When I was in college I would proofread papers for some of my profs and bosses at work and I was horrified by some of them lacking even the most basic writing skills not to mention their really bad spelling.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Trusse.

Hilarious. Kids love it. Graphic book version available.

Seriously, grammar and punctuation are not taught because they are not on 'the test'. Weird when considering our high tech culture depends on precision.

So.... Let's eat grandma...

It's a thing.

It didn't end in a ?
Unless they're asking about the arrow

...that are questions.
There are no question marks!
Curious.

You get the star for noticing that.

...I added "curious".
I had a suspicion you'd try a trick!

You had it right! I was trying to illustrate the sensation for others.

...

In would prefer that we use that as it is in Spanish, it would let a reader know at the beginning what the sentence is. For dyslexics like me, it really makes a difference to have little clues like punctuation.

‽ is triumphant.

All kneel before the might interobang!!!‽