It suddenly occurred to me that punctuation marks are such an important part of any written communication.

There may be a zillion languages out there….but one thing that’s universal is the use of punctuation marks. Well, maybe except for the inverted question mark at the beginning of a sentence in Spanish…and other things that I may not be aware of…anyone know of any others like that?

I cannot begin to imagine reading anything without punctuations think how this paragraph would read without a single mark denoting any kind of emotion at the end of a sentence or even indicating that one discrete thought has come to an end you see what I mean

Apart from reading material, the other form of art/written communication that relies heavily on punctuation marks is….the comic strip! One question mark or exclamation mark over the head of some unfortunate character is often enough to set us laughing uncontrollably….in the Peanuts cartoons, Snoopy’s bird friend Woodstock and his friends speak entirely in little punctuation marks! I am not talking about the symbols that we use to denote swearing…but just “?” and “!” seem to be so widely used in comic strips of all languages.

I wonder why the question mark and the exclamation mark at the opposite corners of my qwerty keyboard? Where are they sited on other keyboards?

We seem to have developed the art of indicating quotation marks with our finvers, but I don’t think we have done that with any other punctuation marks….and that gesture generally has a negative connotation, too.

I recently spotted a butterfly and sent it to Karthik…and he said it was called a Question Mark (the first time a butterfly name has made total sense to me, apart from the Three-Spot Grass Yellow, I mean!) Well, if I had my way, some of the beauties I spot might be called Exclamation Marks, too!

The other punctuation marks have their value, too, and I must mention all those sentences where the punctuation makes all the difference to the meaning….and I must mention the sentences whose periods were getting very heavy, and went into a comma, so it had an operation to have its colon removed, but the surgeon didn’t want to remove the whole thing so it was, afterwards, a sentence with only a semi-colon….and the one which had an exclamation mark because it had lost its clamation marks….and the sentence which referred to someone’s present circumstances, so it had status quo tation marks….all awful puns, copyrighted by…..ME, with a row of dots, a comma, and an exclamation mark!