Celebrating punctuation, houseplants and dessert
National Caviar Day, National Thriftshop Day, heck, there’s even a National Houseplant Appreciation Day. It appears as though everyone’s looking for a reason to celebrate these days, and why not? There’s a certain satisfaction in a day that allows one to not feel bad about indulging in what is usually deemed a guilty pleasure. National Cheesecake Day? Sign me up!
Just over a week ago, on Sept. 24, North America celebrated National Punctuation Day, allowing grammar police everywhere to join forces and wreak havoc on those guilty of committing horrific grammar crimes. What’s more, this can be done without worrying about offending the offenders; the day is dedicated to pointing out errors after all.
Why is punctuation so deserving of its own day, though? For some, punctuation is but an unnecessary inconvenience, complicating the already confusing English language. English teacher Michele Dunaway suggests why this view is common in society today in an article for the column “Teachers at Work.”
“In a modern world of 140 character Twitter shorthand, proper English usage seems to have flown out the window,” notes Dunaway. With that, and the need to communicate more quickly than ever before, the art of a beautifully constructed sentence is lost. In an age where the semicolon is better known as a “winky face” and autocorrect continually proves to be unreliable, a holiday highlighting the importance of punctuation seems strange and unusual.
In light of this national celebration, however, three significant benefits of punctuation should be pointed out. First, punctuation makes for more effective communication.
If you’ve ever read a run on sentence then you’ll understand that with no indication of when to breathe or when to stop reading the process becomes more difficult and the entire point is lost all due to a lack of using punctuation (sorry).
Punctuation is also essential to maintaining social relationships – noting the difference between an “I’m sorry?” and an “I’m sorry” shows that punctuation aids in avoiding awkward, and potentially disastrous, social interactions.
Furthermore, punctuation saves lives! To illustrate, take a look at this standard example: “Let’s eat, grandpa” versus “Let’s eat grandpa.” Just imagine the deathly implications that would result from a simple mistake in that sentence – yikes!
Maybe this is a slight exaggeration, and admittedly I do not have anything close to perfect punctuation. Still, it’s worth getting excited over a holiday that wants to rid society of the common misuses of “their, they’re and their,” and that wishes to celebrate “the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipses,” as stated on the National Punctuation Day website. The website even encourages the public to send in pictures of common grammar and punctuation errors made in society – not a bad way to spend a day.
With that in mind, there is something to be said for these seemingly random holidays. Why limit society to just a few holidays a year, when everyday can be a celebration of simple pleasures that often go unnoticed?
Now, bring on National Dessert Day!