Happy National Punctuation Day!

(Dear official website people, I'm not linking to you because I can't even access your website at work. It has streaming media. Sincerely, Dan.)

So I don't know how to celebrate today. I baked a cake, but unfortunately it's not punctuation-themed; I should have invested in a comma cake pan.

Since the cake was a delicious failure, I've decided to offer a No-Prize (and perhaps something else, if the competition is fierce) to whomever can use the most punctuation marks in one properly-punctuated coherent paragraph without reusing any of them.

Punctuation marks that have to occur as a set (e.g. quotation marks) will count as one point total, and the set can still only be used once. There are no points or penalties for using capitalization or spaces or diacriticals, but use more than one period and you're out.

So have at it, if you're so inclined. Leave your submissions in the comments. The deadline is midnight tonight, Central time.

Bonus punctuation-related content: yesterday Dooce posted an amusing exchange of some slight relevance.

Carol: "Who needs best friends when I have you!!!???"

Me: "Carol, that was three exclamation points and three question marks. Someone out there right now is trying to write a paper and can't because you used up all the punctuation."

Labels: National Punctuation Day, punctuation