Muse Editorial

Just yesterday was National Punctuation Day!!! How could I have missed it?? Certainly, I owe a debt of gratitude to these, my lovely little traffic signals of language. Special shout-out to the semi-colon for its coverage of fine points in meaning and of course, the exclamation point, that has supplied me with huge quantities to use in my texts and e-mails (where for some reason, I find it constantly necessary to exclaim)! Another shout out to the question mark, subcategory, rhetorical questions. Where would we be without you?? And for those who cannot get enough of seriation: gratitude, love, and more for the colon. Commas, periods, you know how I feel about you. You know. You, know. You. Know. There are so many punctuationals to thank! I could go on and on...

National Punctuation Day National Punctuation Day, September 24, celebrates the importance of proper punctuation.

Didn't know you needed this word, but now you know you do, right? You're welcome!

aposiopesis noun: An abrupt breaking off in the middle of a sentence, as if one is unable or unwilling to proceed.

What's not to love about English?

Flotsam Versus Jetsam: The Inside Story

Have you ever wondered while you travel by ship - and who doesn't these days - what words you can use to describe cargo floating in the ocean, besides "cargo floating in the ocean"? Surely there must be more nuanced language to accommodate the complexities of these objects.

Here they come to save the day, Flotsam and Jetsam (capitalizations mine), the most endearing lexical binary since hither and thither!

Their definitions:
Flotsam: Cargo and debris floating in the ocean after a shipwreck.
Jetsam: Cargo and debris thrown overboard a ship.
Entropy versus intention. The inevitable versus the endeavor.

Such teeny, tiny words, given the scope of their respective meanings; how romantic their quaint antiquity.

If you can use them in any context, please do! They probably don't get out much these days.

- Muse

Driving to the grocery store Wednesday, I came upon this conundrum: Is the plural of "paradox" then "paradoces," in the vein of "index/indices"? Or is it a condition, such as suffering, usually without individual units? Yes, I really think about this stuff.