www.alphadictionary.com

I followed a link on some site and it led me to this odd little piece. I'm putting it in Grammar as I do believe punctuation is a part of grammar.

http://theweek.com/article/index/234470 ... d-be-using

My quibble is, How are we supposed to use these thingies? They aren't in any character sets I know of.

These thingies are not in any character sets because they are for the most part absurd. The "odd little piece" is indeed fun, but we have too much punctuation already. We could well do without "!". Comma rules are undecipherable. I always have to look at my keyboard to type most of those gizzies that are shifts to the number keys. Semi-colons are a puzzle to me. Sometimes spell check suggests one, so I use it.

Periods, colons and question marks are pretty straightforward. I like [ ] and { } because I like ( ). ( ) covers a multitude of sins.

There is no key for an em dash "—" or an en dash "–" so, unless, one is automatically provided by the software, or I paste one in, I can't get one. The same goes for em and en spaces. I used to be a typographer and I miss them. I like the apostrophe and the quotation marks although some fonts, including this one, do not distinguish the right from the left. I suppose they don't know their right from their left (Jonah 4:11).

Let's live with the punctuation we have. Early writing had none at all, not even the word space. I am particularly glad for the word space.