For the Love of Punctuation

It is one of life’s great ironies that God paired me – a meticulous grammarian – with my husband, whose spelling is, shall we say, creative.

A talented singer and musician, my spouse is an auditory thinker. He is a gifted writer and types at lightning speed, but often, he instinctually spells words based on the way they sound. The approach works well for locutions like “market” or “record”, but is less effective with a word like, well, “locution”.

I try not to tease him about his creative constructs, but he gladly kids me about my anal-retentive approach to text. (Admittedly, I have been known to gripe about typos on menus and instruction manuals with dangling participles.) So, I was both relieved and comforted when I recently discovered a group of like-minded wordsmiths at The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG, for short).

The following excerpt from the SPOGG Website captures the humor and vision of its creators, and offers a warm welcome to those with a punctilious personality like mine:

There are huge problems in this world, and then there are problems that can be solved by everyday people with red pens and a little moxie.

The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar is for pen-toters appalled by wanton displays of Bad English. (And we’re not talking about Bad English, the band, although their song “Heaven is a 4 letter word” needs a hyphen.)

SPOGG is for people who crave good, clean English — sentences cast well and punctuated correctly. It’s about clarity. And who knows how many of the world’s huge problems could be solved if we had a little more of that?

Ah, at last a refuge from this crazy, mixed-up world of text messages and linguistic short-hand! A safe haven from the jargon of Fortune 500 companies and verbosity of new media ventures! A place where people appreciate crisp, uncluttered writing, and members are lauded for their use of proper punctuation. I can find solace in the blog posts, and vicariously vent my frustration at the lack of good grammar usage in modern society.

Plus, they have really cute T-shirts.