Industry standards

Collateral Trumping

There's a particu'ly dark place in my heart

for wise-ass spelling-and/or-grammar-type jokes

that have mistakes in them.

[UPDATE: Hereafter, 'The Nth Circle'.]

Waterstone(')s

Waterstones, formerly Waterstone's, is a British book retailer...

- Wikipedia

How to use the hyphen

It seems to me that an electronic text cannot emotionally engage its owner as can an actual book ‒ paper, papyrus or vellum, airport paperback or Daunt Books hardback or super-luxurious lavishly-illustrated limited-edition coffee-table tome.

- Josh Spero, Second-Hand Stories (imminent)

Running 'free'

A brilliantly wrong sentence from an Esquire article on how to not hate running:

If you are determined, though, to invest some cash into your new pursuit – so as to guilt yourself into committing to it, because that technique has never not worked – free running shoes are a worthy investment.

- Adam Baidawi, Esquire

Winter Sunday

[with thanks to winter_sunday]

'The three war cemeteries...'

Is it a 'thing', then, in commemorative inscriptions (and/or elsewhere) that you can put a comma between words written in the lower case, but not if they're in capital letters?

Or does one of those two (?) places contain two (or indeed even three) war cemeteries within it?

(One might argue, in the circumstances, that the comma before 'saith the LORD' is one of the more superfluous punctuation marks in the English language.)

'Following The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, a novel set on a Greek island in 1940 about the eternal triangle that develops between a doctor's daughter, her fisherman fiance and a young officer who is billeted in the doctor's house....' WHAT?

How not to use commas*

Have downloaded a copy for the widow of Pte XXX of XXX who died in the 1970s and who has just donated items to the Airborne Museum at Duxford.

- [irrelevant; but dated 17/09/2014]

--
* in fact, how not to not use them...

How to use commas

Let it be, for all I care, someone else's wife who rang, barely a minute earlier, while he was sauntering houndstoothed up Charing Cross Road to his sun-filled offices in Bloomsbury, to announce, 'Enough, over, it's been wonderful, but something more wonderful has come my way.'

- Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It

Cambridge finals students flummoxed

by South African poem with no words.

In the circumstances, I would like to know how many of them addressed the likelihood that Koos Kombuis's 'Tipp-Ex-Sonate' is probably also in translation...

[Baie dankie to Alexandra Coghlan, for the tip-ex-off]

An April Fool(!)

Mae Dappersonne introduces Penguin Now!, a new range of classic novels grammatically updated for 2014.

Should Penguin Now! prove a success, the team are looking into replacing the traditional ? with a more contemporary :/

[With thanks to Alexandra Coghlan]

Making friends in the big house

And just so you know, there's no hyphen in 'killing spree'.

- Charlie Sheen, Anger Management

¡Doh!

Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?")...

- Pico Iyer, 'In Praise of the Humble Comma', Time

Fact!

The distance between inspiring and manipulating is sometimes only an exclamation mark.

- AA Gill, Sunday Times

Fact

The question mark in the Requiem typeface is uncommonly ugly. It looks like someone has beaten it with a poker.

Better -

At first glance, I thought this was a punctuation gag:

Jack Dee ‏ @TheRealJackDee

Sorry about that. as I was saying, went for a curry last ni... sorry, better dash 

Dyer transcription

While writing up a recent interview with G Dyer, I stumble upon this classic typo

I can’t even decided whether it should be in the present or past tense

and this transcription dilemma

I had fun writing this – exclamation mark[!(?)]

Suggestions on a postcard, please.

Challenge

I had never heard anyone say my thoughts out, word for word, including the punctuation.

- AL Kennedy, 'Christine', Now that you're back