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It's National Punctuation Day!  Can you believe that‽ 

My apologies if the punctuation at the end of that last sentence didn't come through: it's an interrobang: a combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark that can be used to express incredulity. Sure, you could just type both an exclamation mark and a question mark, but who has time for that⸮  

And that sentence had an irony mark at the end.  It was proposed in the 16th century, though I've seen many people suggest that we need irony punctuation now in the internet era when irony is often misunderstood.

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These and other obscure punctuation marks are described at Mental Floss magazine.

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There are a couple of punctuation-related notions I'd like to mention. One is the question of how many spaces are after the period. I was always told to add two  spaces, but many people consider this to be a crime against humanity.  I don't have strong feelings either way, and I am pretty inconsistent about it.  So if you are offended by it, I'm sorry.  But you should really blame my Grade 9 typing teacher.

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The other is to point out just how often punctuation in computer text goes wrong in today's world.  Just today I saw an item on the BBC World news scroll about the Pope’s trip to America. 

The typo is frustrating because, for one thing, I know what's going wrong.  As I mentioned recently, text files are just numbers representing letters (and punctuation marks.)  Unfortunately, there's more than one standard code for representing letters, and things go wrong when a program is expecting one way of representing characters, and it gets a different way.  Here's a page that explains it in more depth.

But it's doubly frustrating because no one seems to care.  The news scroll went by several times with the error, and I've seen similar problems several times before.  Newspapers puke meaningless characters all the time, reminding us just how few proofreaders they can afford.  You know, the ampersand (&) is a deformation of the handwritten Latin word et. Perhaps centuries from now, their apostrophe will be based on the ’ characters. 

Who knows what Victor Borge would do with that.