From Carpe Diem to Comma Diem

Punctuate The Day!,.-();:’/

Every time foreign batters think they’ve figured out hitting what the American mind pitches, we throw them a sliding sinker and today is no exception.

For the rest of the world, today is Thursday, September 24, 2009. For Americans, it’s National Punctuation Day.

Punctuation means those squiggly little marks in printed English that occasionally help meaning and always get points deducted from your essay questions when you misuse them. Punctuation is what keeps composition teachers in business. Without punctuation, we would write as we speak and speak as we write, and composition teachers would have to find honest work.

But a national holiday?

If you doubt it, check this website, but be warned that it gives a very unbalanced, pro-punctuation view. Let’s look.

The kicker above the headline on this piece is a quote from an old Roman dude named Horace and the “carpe diem” is generally translated as “Seize the day.”

That puts it in the same bag as “Make hay while the sun shines,” “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” “Time waits for no man” and “Make whoopee while her folks ain’t looking.”

Except it’s not the full quote. The full quote from old Horace is “carpe diem quam minimum credula postero” and you will note that Horace got that one out without a comma or a period, but the English translation most use would be “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.”

Which uses a comma, because in English all that stuff after the comma tells you how to seize the day, not that you should look for a day with strong doubts about the future.

Got that?

No?

Relax, lots of folks don’t get it either, and even those who do enjoy endless disputes over tiny differences. As the National Punctuation Day website explains, some folks think a sentence describing the colors of the American flag should be written “The flag is red, white and blue.” Others think it should be written “The flag is red, white, and blue.”

Whether or not to put a comma after “white” is called the Serial Comma Dispute and it’s a sure-fire bar bet if you’re unfortunate enough to hang around a bar where patrons bet on punctuation trivia instead of the Yankees.

Not to trivialize punctuation. A lady named Lynne Truss wrote a 2004 book called “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” The book jacket shows a panda walking away from the title with a handgun, since the dreaded comma in the title describes the ultimate stiffing of a waiter instead of a panda’s diet.

It’s a fun book and an amusing book and you can find it on Amazon here, but anyone who thinks pandas are toting firearms after reading that sentence has bigger issues than National Punctuation Day can handle.

Still, enjoy the day. Seize it, even. You might also follow the website’s suggestion to “Organize punctuation activities at your school, library, or office.”

Just be prepared to deal with the police who respond to a report of “Puncs taking over library.”

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