We all like to poke fun at those little lapses of punctuation that float around the Internet, and when better than National Punctuation Day on September 24th to bring these gems up? You know the ones: “Egg’s 5¢,” “Caution: ‘Wet’ floor,” “Smile your on camera,” “Please ‘do not’ disturb.” Everyone likes to cringe and point, but it takes a punctuation nut to get truly emotional about it—the grammarians, the English professors, all those writers,
We’ve all seen them. And despite our best intentions, we’ve all made them. Like it or not, typos are a fact of written communication. They sneak into our writing while we’re not looking—or while we’re looking too hard—and scatter random double words, transposed letters, missing punctuation and a host of other embarrassing mistakes in their wake. None of us is immune: students submitting coursework, editors for major newspapers, directors of public relations, we all fall prey to typos.
It’s fairly common to shorten names. We watch “TV” these days, rather than “television.” We call our Williams “Bill” and our Katherines “Kat.” We can dial up AAA for roadside assistance, withdraw funds from an ATM, stop by an HEB on our way home, and cook our dinner with PAM. If something amuses us, perhaps we LOL or even LMAO. We might tell our BFFs we’ll see them L8R or sign off with TTYL.
