Recently in the Punctuation Category

Back in March, I came across this AP headline:

More than math, reading important

I read it as saying that reading was more important than math, but the article is about attempts to "broaden the focus [of education] beyond math and reading." So I started to write an entry here to make fun of the headline for having nothing to do with the article body.

And then I realized that I'd misread the headline.

It's using the common headline technique of replacing an "and" with a comma. So it really meant that more topics than math and reading are important.

So it's a perfectly reasonable headline for the article, except for the ease of misreading it. I would still say it's a bad headline, but on very different grounds than my original impression.

From an article about rescued Chinese miners:

But today rescuers hailed a miracle as they pulled more than 100 miners to safety after eight days trapped underground. They had survived by strapping themselves to the walls, eating sawdust and sheer tenacity.

Mmmm, tenacity.

(Thanks to Arthur E for the pointer.)

As reported by Womzilla, via Supergee on the cranky_editors LiveJournal community:

Several groups trying to re-ignite New England's faith are theologically conservative, such as the Southern Baptists [and others]. They say a reason for the region's hollowed-out faith is a pervasive theology that departs from traditional Biblical interpretation on issues such as the divinity of Jesus, the exclusivity of Christianity as a path to salvation and homosexuality.

—from an AP article, "Evangelists target spiritually cold New England," as published at Yahoo! News

Every year around this time, a question of the utmost importance occurs to me.

I refer, of course, to the question of whether this holiday honors mothers or a mother—that is, whether the apostrophe should go before or after the S.

Fortunately, since the advent of Wikipedia, it's easy to answer that question definitively. The Wikipedia article on the topic quotes a Vancouver Sun article from 2008. The article is about Anna Jarvis, who trademarked the term "Mother's Day" in 1912; it notes:

She was specific about the location of the apostrophe; it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world.

Of course, one could go against Jarvis's wishes—it's not like we pay much attention to her other intentions for the day:

"I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit," Jarvis complained, dismissing greeting cards as "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write."

But other sources also suggest the singular apostrophe placement. For example, from Wikipedia again:

[The singular apostrophe has also been] used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in the law making official the holiday in the U.S., by the U.S. Congress on bills, and by other U.S. presidents on their declarations.

And MW11 supports that punctuation as well. So I'll go along with it.

(Yes, I could have just checked the dictionary in the first place. But this route was more interesting. I had no idea the term was trademarked, for example.)