My phone buzzed at midnight. “We’ve got a situation,” my boss said. “Someone let the exclamation points out of their cage.”
I found Main Street littered with hysteria. “EVERYTHING IS AMAZING!!!” screamed one store sign. The stop signs had caught the fever: “PLEASE STOP!!!!!” Even quiet old Shakespeare was shouting: “TO BE OR NOT TO BE!!!” We tried releasing some calming periods, but by then the question marks were already starting to straighten out, tempted by the excitement.
This wasn’t my first grammar emergency. Last week, someone broke the spell-checker. Watching “their, they’re, and there” duke it out in public was embarrassing for everyone. The homophones never recovered—”to, too, and two” still won’t speak to each other. “Affect” and “effect” had a very public meltdown at the Grammar Gala. Now they’re both in therapy.
I’ve seen things in this job. Things that would make a dictionary weep. Back when I worked security at Webster’s, it was simpler. Just manning the velvet rope, deciding which new words got in. No drama. Well, except for that time “literally” started literally hitting on “figuratively.” Or when the prefix “un” got drunk and tried to negate every word in sight.
But lately, I’m seeing signs of hope everywhere. The other day, I caught a teenager using a semicolon correctly—on purpose. In Starbucks, someone ordered a “tall” coffee without making air quotes. “Whom” made an appearance at a black-tie event, and “nevertheless” showed up as its plus-one.
A college application essay arrived with all its commas in the right places. My neighbor’s kid wrote “you are” instead of “u r” in a thank you note. Small victories, but they add up.
The real breakthrough came yesterday. A complete sentence was spotted in the wild—subject, verb, and everything. It had proper punctuation and wasn’t even trying to hide it. Soon others emerged, growing bolder. By sunset, an entire paragraph had formed in the park, all its clauses properly coordinated.
Even the internet is showing signs of recovery. Someone used “its” and “it’s” correctly in the same tweet. A YouTube comment contained both capitalization and a period. Three people on Facebook discovered the paragraph break.
Maybe proper grammar isn’t dead; it’s just been waiting for its comeback tour. Like vinyl records and vintage fashion, good writing never really goes out of style. It just needs someone to believe in it—one properly placed apostrophe at a time.
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Dana Wall traded spreadsheets for prose sheets when she got her MFA from Goddard College in Vermont in 2020. She now writes full time from her home in Manhattan Beach, California.