Showing posts with label punctuation is a moral issue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label punctuation is a moral issue. Show all posts
02 September 2019

The Rise of the “Oxford Comma“

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A weekend Twitter conversation with editor Harold Underdown and picture book creator Debbie Ridpath Ohi set me digging for the origin of the...
03 November 2014

Quote Unquote

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In an article for Slate , Andrew Heisel probed the growth of an unorthodox use of single-quote marks: For several years now in teaching wr...
30 January 2014

Balloonacy at the B.C.R.

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This evening the Boston Comics Roundtable did an activity I invented called Balloonacy. It didn’t pan out exactly as I’d imagined since we’...
16 December 2013

Networks Toying With Us?

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In the latest “Fat Man on Batman” podcast , writer Paul Dini spoke candidly about recent trends in superhero cartoons on television (as tran...
2 comments:
04 November 2013

“Add a Manicule in the Margin,” Tom Said Pointedly.

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I read a couple of interesting extracts from Keith Houston’s new book on typography, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Sym...
21 August 2013

What Fell Out of 52 Pickup

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It was a warm, clear day when I heard that crime novelist Elmore Leonard had died after well over eighty years and forty books. That news ...
14 February 2013

A Real Reason to Boycott

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Facing criticism from fans for hiring Orson Scott Card, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality and marriage equality, to write a Superman st...
07 January 2013

My Authority Record

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Last week I received a nice note from a university library: I’m cataloging your George Washington's headquarters and home . I wish t...
02 October 2012

No Climbdown from Baum on “Climb Down”

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I started this series of postings with a quotation from L. Frank Baum ’s  Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz , with Dorothy admonishing a horse...
1 comment:
01 October 2012

Baum and The Inland Printer

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In the 1890s L. Frank Baum and his family moved to Chicago. He supported them as a freelance journalist and traveling salesman before par...
25 September 2012

The Pushback against “Climb Down”

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As L. Frank Baum ’s Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz suggests in the passage I quoted yesterday , there were people in America around the tur...
2 comments:
12 September 2012

Our Anachronistic Equine Vocabulary

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There’s no Y in “linchpin.” Lots of people have taken to spelling the word with a Y in place of the first I because we hardly ever see lin...
6 comments:
09 February 2012

Amelia's Path to Publishing Success

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Publishers Weekly featured Brigid Alverson’s profile of Jimmy Gownley , writer, artist, and for a time publisher of the Amelia Rules comi...
17 November 2011

“Characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud”

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At a new blog called Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa traces the development of thought balloons in the first year of Superman and Sp...
2 comments:
11 August 2011

The Most Endangered Comma

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As long as I’m talking commas, I should mention last month’s Twitterfuffle over the “Oxford comma” used before a conjunction in series, as i...
1 comment:
10 August 2011

The Wizard Will Explain It!

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As long as I’m on the topic of this message from the MGM Wizard of Oz , how do you read this message grammatically? The “SURRENDER” is an...
3 comments:
09 August 2011

Sarcasm for the Masses

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Three years after Oz and Ends suggested using backslant (i.e., left-leaning italics) as a way to signal written sarcasm, Sartalics.com ha...
2 comments:
06 April 2010

Gasp! A Short History of Comic-Book Exhalations

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Last month master comics letterer Todd Klein looked at the evolution of a form of punctuation unique to comics: breath marks . Those are li...
02 April 2010

Superman Battles the Challenge of Thought!

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This panel is from Action Comics , #6, the sixth comic book to contain a Superman story. Lois Lane and Clark Kent are building that wonderf...
22 October 2009

Marks of Irony and Sarcasm

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At the recent gathering of children’s-book bloggers in Washington, I understand that mention was made of my past reports on humanity’s long...
1 comment: