The book I've been reading in the last couple days asks one question many times and in different ways: Why are some people so pedantic with the language (and enjoy that)? After all, once you have conveyed the meaning of what you want to say, isn't form just a useless burden? In the case of punctuation, shouldn't we just get rid of most (if not all) of it and only keep the words? Wouldn't it make things better?

Personally, I think this fixation (which I share too, up to a point) stems from the need of order and clarity some people have. Punctuation has been introduced to make written text clearer for readers and actors, and slowly it has acquired grammatical meaning too. Why should we get rid of something that has slowly developed to make communication less ambiguous, just because people cannot be bothered to learn it properly?

#language #grammar #thoughts