Coffee Klatch

It seems to me that many people today don’t know how to punctuate correctly. Whether it’s because they never really learned proper grammar in that domain or whether they just have forgotten or don’t even care, it’s a sad state of affairs.

One biggie is that people have learned that you put in a comma when you would normally pause when speaking. The problem is that people pause in weird (and grammatically incorrect) places, so they think they should put commas there when they are writing. I think we need a course in Commas 101 or something. And somehow make it required of everybody who speaks the language. But that’s as impossible as creating a mandatory Common Sense test for American DRIVERS!!

Here is a sentence that will test your grammar skills. Please punctuate the following sentence appropriately:

Woman without her man is nothing

It has been demonstrated that there are two ways that this sentence typically gets punctuated. Scientific and accurate tests have shown that 90% of men punctuate the sentence: “Woman, without her man, is nothing.” while 90% of women punctuate it: “Woman: without her, man is nothing.” [and of course we all know that 78% of statistics are made up on the spot]

Okay, I freely admit that the appropriate punctuation for that sentence would not properly contain any commas or anything at all, regardless of which way you read it. It’s just a linguistic game that plays with the intentions and perspectives of men and women. So don’t take it too seriously. Just laugh and then set it aside and get on with your life.
Ciao!

On today’s date in history, there were more interesting birthdays and events. Of course, this is most likely true of any day of the year if you look hard enough, but some days do seem to have more interesting events or birthdays than others.

Birthdays: King Alphonso II of Naples (1448), King Edward V of England (1470), Mary of Orange (mother of William III) (1631), Karl III Philip, Elector Palatine (1661), Will Rogers (1879), Walter Cronkite (1916), Art Carney (1918), Darla Hood (from Little Rascals) (1931), Loretta Swit (1937), Laura Bush (1946), Robert Mapplethorpe (1946), Kathy Griffin (1961), Ralph Macchio (1962), “Just” Diddy (1969), Matthew McConaughey (1969).

Events:
1584 - St. Charles Borromeo dies
1677 - The future Mary II of England marries William III, Prince of Orange
1842 - Abraham Lincoln marries Mary Todd in Springfield, IL
1847 - Felix Mendelssohn dies
1854 - Lighthouse established on Alcatraz Island
1862 - Gatling gun patented (by Richard J. Gatling)
1866 - Kingdom of Italy annexes Venetia
1869 - First issue of the scientific journal Nature is published
1873 - Gold crown patented (by dentist John Beers of San Francisco)
1904 - First stadium built specifically for football (Harvard Stadium)
1918 - WWI, Austria-Hungary surrenders to Italy
1921 - Sturmabteilung (SA) formally formed by Adolf Hitler
1922 - Howard Carter discovers King Tut’s Tomb
1924 - Gabriel Fauré dies
1939 - First air-conditioned car exhibited (Packard)
1946 - United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) formed
1948 - T.S. Eliot wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
1966 - Flooding of Arno and Po Rivers, submerging 2/3 of Florence, Italy, destroying countless Renaissance artworks and books
1979 - Iran Hostage Crisis begins
1993 - Jean Chrétien becomes Prime Minister of Canada
1995 - Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assasinated
2003 - Largest ever solar flare recorded