The Decade's Best Punctuation

Who thinks about punctuation? Besides copy editors and hobbyist grammarians, that is. Punctuation is utilitarian, the periods and commas and question marks meant to merely indicate where we should stop and pause and inflect upwards.

What fun, then, that in his alternately giddy and literary collection of humorous essays, "Pure Drivel," Steve Martin includes a piece entitled "Times Roman Font Announces Shortage of Periods," in which punctutation is the joke. From the opening sentence:

Representatives of the popular Times Roman font, who recently announced a shortage of periods, have offered other substitutes — inverted commas, exclamation marks, and semi-colons until the period crisis is able to be overcome by people such as yourself, who, through creative management of surplus punctuation, can perhaps allay the constant demand for periods, whose heavy usage in the last ten years, not only in English but in virtually every language in the world, is creating a burden on writers everywhere, thus generating a litany of comments such as: What the hell am I supposed to do without my periods?

to the final sentence, there is one — exactly one — period in the entire essay. That one period, though, is not the entire purpose of the piece; it just underscores the real joke. Written in a breathless journalistic style (in a way that closely resembles, and mimics, those over-the-top spots network newsmagazines specialize in) the essay explores all the ramifications of period shortage such as sentences that cannot be stopped and the rampant misuse of the ellipsis, complete with quotes from experts and aggrieved writers. As the essay narrator says of the shortage at the end, "it has made at least this author appreciate and value his ... period," so does this quirky piece by Martin make this reader appreciate all punctuation even more.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)