National Punctuation Day Needs More Than Ad Errors. Try Victor Borge.

There’s a movement dedicated to helping us punctuate precisely . On the National Punctuation Day® website, discover a “celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks…and the ever mysterious ellipsis.”

Entire books are devoted to the subject – the best known probably Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Great websites cover the wince-making world of mispunctuation. And there are photos of screwed-up signs, billboards, ads and packaging by the dozens.

E.g., I’m particularly grateful for today’s Signalwriter post visual first posted by Sarah Long, English-language writer at GBG Copywriting in Gothenburg, Sweden. Particularly – because it’s one of several portraying a mistake in the old Stella Artois “Perfection has its price” ad campaign. And because client Cameron Wallace of Helix ESG loves Stella.

This post’s for you, Cameron. But I also wanted to draw attention to the “Holiday Happiness” page of Bar Business – the editors present 10 or 12 ideas for bars and pubs to use for letting their customers have some fun and make more money for the month ahead. Featured in the August issue there’s a Virgin Mary Day (promoting non-alcoholic cocktails on 9/8) for example, and a National Punch Day (9/20, great for specially priced but enormous portions of alcoholic punch).

For 9/24, National Punctuation Day, the magazine suggests:

On this day you can have your bar staff annunciate the punctuation marks required by their conversational sentences. If they pause they say comma. If they shout they say exclamation point. And when they ask a customer, “what can I get you,” they say question mark. Get ready for a weird day.

I’ll say exclamation point. Do you think bartenders and wait staffers get paid enough for this question mark. In any case comma it apostrophe s a great reminder of a different phonetic punctuation sketch invented by pianist hyphen comedian Victor Borge period So to celebrate comma watch this routine on YouTube period

Remember it apostrophe s National Punctuation Day long hyphen proofread your stuff period