Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: August 2017

• It’s Imperative

  Posted at 1:52 am by kayewer, on August 27, 2017

  The latest issue of Reader’s Digest features an article about punctuation marks we may not know about but might want to use more frequently. The one that caught my attention is called the interrobang, a combination of a question mark and exclamation point used to stress excitement in a question instead of using clusters of both marks together.  Its cousin is the percontation mark, a reverse question mark designed to designate a sentence a rhetorical question.  A third interesting mark is called the certitude point, used to denote absolute finality and conviction.

  Many applications online do not use these marks, but probably the best places to bring them back to life would be social media. Imagine looking at a snarky sentence in a post, and seeing a snark mark–a dot and curlicue–which leaves no doubt as to the user’s frame of mind.  There is a mark to denote irony, to encourage skepticism and to express open-hearted love. Our online crack sites are the perfect places for these distinctive marks.

  Here is an article from Mental Floss to explain more:

  http://mentalfloss.com/article/12710/13-little-known-punctuation-marks-we-should-be-using

  If you agree, let’s storm social media and bring these marks back to life.

   

   

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• It’s Monumental

  Posted at 2:54 am by kayewer, on August 20, 2017

  I don’t know what to think about tearing down statues in the South. Removing them does not make the Civil War go away, nor does it make the persons depicted on them any more or less human and error-prone than they were in life. We are human, and if history is doomed to repeat itself, then we will continue to make stupid mistakes. That doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the good things people do, even if we make it a point to also make note of their flaws.

  When Shakespeare noted that our evil deeds remain long after we die while the good is buried with us, he probably had no idea we would be coming to this. Sure slaves built and maintained the South under many evil watchful eyes, but good people–black and white–live there now, free except for the emotional baggage they keep bringing up every once in awhile. For some, it is an emotional scar, but for others it is just like carrying around a burr to sit upon on occasion to remember how our past was so hurtful.

  Sure we need to recognize that our history had some dark times. We are certainly not guaranteed a future without more of them. Taking down representations of our history won’t change who we are, were or will be. It will simply warp the remembrances of our past and lessen the chance that we may learn about how to improve what is to come.

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• An “Island Nation”

  Posted at 2:49 am by kayewer, on August 13, 2017

  It looks like the leader of North Korea might be a Star Wars fan, because he thinks the island of Guam is Alderaan  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0qLzsIhUMk); a peaceful place which would make a good demonstration model to show off his tactical might. I am trying to put anything but a deadly spin on this issue because the idea of somebody hurting the island infuriates and terrifies me.

  Of course, the island in the Pacific Ocean does hold an Air Force base, but other than being a prominent non-continental player in WWII, it’s really just an off campus site for the military to learn to park, work on and sometimes fly jets. What North Korea would really do, if they aimed weapons at the island, is annihilate an entire indigenous people and likely doom an oceanic ecosystem, both of which cannot be replaced.

  It is sad that the future of our country and world is coming down to a political pissing contest between two people in power who refuse to budge. It almost looks like the end of the Dr. Seuss story “The Butter Battle Book,” in which two sides hold destructive devices in their hands and simply wait for whomever will make the first move.

  It would be better if they both took a bathroom break.

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• Thumbs Up

  Posted at 2:48 am by kayewer, on August 6, 2017

  We women all know about the one fingernail on our hands that never behaves. Sure we have bad hand days, but ultimately our biggest manual fails are the fault of one particular finger.

  Some of us have two bad nails. I am one of them.

  Back in high school, one of my fingers decided to linger in a doorway of the library, and the door closed on it. The nail died and took a couple of months to grow out and drop off, and the new one has a permanent vertical ridge in it as a reminder of that fateful day. So that nail has a kink in it. Fortunately it didn’t cause me any grief today.

  My thumb, on the other hand–well, actually it’s the same hand–tends to get me in trouble not by trying to hitch rides, but by running into things. This morning, while trying to turn the car radio off, I put a horizontal split in my thumbnail. It’s in one of those places one cannot take a file or emery to. So I did the old school fix of trying to seal it up with nail polish, and promptly spilled the bottle on the living room carpet.

  So today it feels like I have ten children, and one of them is spoiling it for the other eight. No thumb ring for you, buster, until you grow up and grow out.

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  	Eden on Getting the Message
  	Eden on The Unasked Questions
  	Eden on And Her Shoes Were #9
  	Eden on The Poison Field
  	Eden on Final Tally