God’s third language

As I turned to leave Ibondo village, I realized I’d forgotten to pray for the interns I was entrusting to Matayo for the weekend.  So I turned to the preacher and said (in Swahili), “I want to pray for these guys before I head back to Geita.”

poorly placed holiday apostrophes

Yesterday I mentioned my frustration with (what should be known as) Mothers’ Day being touted as Mother’s Day.  That’s just wrong.  Now, in that day belonging to Saint Patrick, the apostrophe shall come before the “s.”  The same with Lincoln’s Birthday. But when our intent is to celebrate mothers everywhere (plural), clearly the holiday should be referred to as Mothers’ Day.  On this I will not budge.

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“So,” I thought to myself, “how many of our other holidays have been ruined by poor punctuation?”  Well…here’s a list* to at least get us started:

my favorite animals, the oxford comma and you

This post is not about Vampire Weekend, though to answer their question it’s me who gives a cares a great deal about an Oxford comma.  In fact today’s entire discourse is about commas. Well… commas, grammar and syntax and sentence structure.  Do you see what I did there?  I left out the serial comma and the contents of this post are not quite so clear, are they?

The Oxford (or serial) comma is the comma which appears immediately before the coordinating conjunction in a list of three or more items.  You can see it below in red.

Ex.)  My favorite animals are pumas, unicorns, leprechauns, and books about turtles.

making exercise

I was out for a run this morning and passed a group of guys building a fence.  One of them obviously wanted to practice his English and called out to me, “Hey, man.”

I responded with, “Good morning.”

Then, in a really strange cadence, he offered:

“You… are.  Making exercise.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I am making exercise,”  I mumbled, probably already out of earshot.

Although, if you ask me, making exercise sounds like a really poor colloquialism for the marital act.  Of course, it’s not any worse than that one.

national punctuation day haiku

I’m so sorry I missed posting on the blog yesterday about National Punctuation Day.  I’m sure, though, most of you were too busy celebrating with family and friends to read anything I would have written anyway.

However, you’re NOT too late to enter the National Punctuation Day Punctuation Haiku Contest.  All you have to do to be eligible for prizes is send your best haiku(s) celebrating punctuation to Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com before September 30.

Here are my own entries:

Unaccompanied,
a single parenthesis –
poor, lonely grammar.

A dash in my thoughts,
interrupting myself with –
it’s not a hyphen.

“Your punctuation”
is very different from
“you’re punctuation.”

A comma, a dash –
semicolon; period.
Pauses myriad.

Your turn.  Join the contest by emailing Jeff; but also leave your own punctuation haiku in the comments section below.