AFTERNOON BREAK
by Peggy Curtis
cat sleeping
the comma
Illustration: “Sleeping cat,” ceramic bowl by Rukaya, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Archives for posts with tag: punctuation
“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.” HARUKI MURAKAMI, IQ84
Photo: Bazich, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
AFTERNOON BREAK
by Peggy Curtis
cat sleeping
the comma
Illustration: “Sleeping cat,” ceramic bowl by Rukaya, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
The Book of Unnecessary Quotation Marks: A Celebration of Creative Punctuation by Bethany Keely (Chronicle, 2009) was one of my recent one-dollar finds at a Los Angeles Out of the Closet thrift store — and I enjoyed it so much that I felt as if I’d won a jackpot. (I find misspelled and improperly punctuated signs both sad and funny.) During the past few days, the book has provided many laughs, as I’ve explored 176 pages of photos featuring real-world signs that include unnecessary quotation marks.
The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is an outgrowth of the author’s “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. If you’d like a little levity today, visit Bethany Keely‘s blog: unnecessaryquotes.com.
Find The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks at Amazon.com.
Credit: Cartoon by Mark Stivers, 2003, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Caption: I’ll have the misspelled ‘Ceasar’ salad and the improperly hyphenated veal osso-buco.”
Credit: New Yorker cartoon by Jack Ziegler, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.”
RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Long Goodbye
Photo: Heather L. Shannon, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“They [semicolons] are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.” GERTRUDE STEIN
Painting: “Semicolon in a Flesh Comma,” 1993. Oil on linen, 12×16, by Mira Schor, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Visit the artist at her website.
“The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood. …For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.” EDGAR ALLAN POE
Photo: Heather L. Shannon, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke” F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Illustration: Cecil Touchon, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Silver Birch Press 