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61 " Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as “the invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love”. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling”. "
― Lynne Truss , Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
62 " I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics. "
63 " What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. "
64 " Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, “The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition. "
65 " If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without. "
66 " humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes), "
67 " pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. "
68 " No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. "
69 " Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a “house style”. "
70 " So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician's assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete. "
71 " nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. "
72 " The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has” then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. "
73 " In fact, it seemed to me that every single item on the news – concerning economic doom and political hypocrisy and social breakdown – was not “news” at all. What I could hear was just a series of utterly transparent ploys to frighten and alarm the listeners – and frighten them, moreover, about the wrong things. The "
― Lynne Truss , Cat Out of Hell
74 " I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons "
75 " As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price. "
76 " Although I would appreciate it if you tried not to sound so bloody sarcastic. Beelzebub himself ticked me off the other day for not getting the proper respect from you blasted cats. He came all the way from Pandemonium because he found out that the Captain had started calling me "mate." I said to him: it's a different world nowadays, Beelzebub. It's not as respectful as it used to be. People on mobile phones; people cycling on the pavement; people cycling across pedestrian crossings even when the lights are against them. "
77 " That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne. "
78 " In Beachcomber’s hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: “For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an its.” Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall. "
79 " Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s. "
80 " Once someone has shown you a convincingly different way of looking at the world, it's hard to remember how you saw it before. "