The Chicago Tribune had a fun article about punctuation stories. There are some good ones, but this one is my favorite:
quote:
Maybe it's not surprising that New York City, capital of the U.S. publishing industry, has plenty of lore about semicolons. When former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was annoyed by an overeducated bureaucrat, he used the insult "semicolon boy." When the Son of Sam killer put a semicolon in a note, police speculated he might be a freelance journalist. (Killer David Berkowitz was a security guard and cabdriver.)
Being in health care, I rather liked this one, too:
quote:
Playwright George Bernard Shaw hated apostrophes, writing: "There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli."
I can't understand why he hated apostrophes so much.
