I love living in a time in America when everyone is saying the phrase "stimulus package." I always grin - and most often keep my comments to myself.

Why is it that curse words get to claim the letter they start with?
The N-word, the F-bomb, the B-word. I recently heard that McCain said the S-word. I was wondering why that was so scandalous when I realized the newsguy meant "socialist."

So what would be your version of these lettered words, if they were of your choosing and not curses:
The A-word
The B-word
The F-word
The N-word
The S-word

For me... maybe
Aphrodisiac
Boring
Fried
Normal
Skinny

I'm reading a book that Julie sent me called "The Birth House" by Ami McKay. I underlined this sentence:

"Victory isn't anywhere near the same as peace."

Do you write in your books? What I write depends on the book. Sometimes I just underline or star so I can find that part later. Sometimes I write a counterpoint or a sound, like "mmmm".

When my ex-grandmother-in-law passed away and everyone was picking over her things, putting their name on stickers on her stuff, I just took a couple of books off her shelf. One was her Bible. I had hoped she wrote in the margins, although she didn't. She did have a chapter torn out of a sexy detective novel stuck right in 1 Thessalonians. There was no writing in that either.

I have a friend who was reading in the Library of Congress. He was outraged to find notes penciled into the margins of a very old book. He took it to the librarian who told him that those were written in there by the man who donated the book to help start the Library: Thomas Jefferson. Wouldn't those margin notes be cool to read?

You know, some of the scriptures in the Bible were margin notes written by the scribes that later scribes just included?

Sorry for the long gap.
I finally finished that long book, World Without End by Ken Follet last night at 12:30. I have several observations to share, but first, I have to catch up on everything that went by the wayside while I was reading.

So,I'll tell you my Urban Word of the Day: Choreplay. Can you guess what it is?

I've been intermittently reading two books on punctuation:
Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik and
Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, which I originally thought was a diet book.
Both are great and both have me thinking about my writing in different ways.

So with these thoughts of punctuation reorganizing in my head, I enjoyed my son's recent punctuation misunderstanding.

I had gathered my children together to declare that they needed to maintain a list all week of the items they keep getting told they need for school, or for upcoming sports and scouts. I would not, could not run to the store every day for one thing at a time. I reminded them that they could list books that they were told they would need. Then I said, "Kat needs 'To Kill A Mockingbird.'"
Kyle was startled. He didn't hear the quotation marks or see the capitalization. It hadn't occurred to me that he didn't know this was a book title. Hasn't everyone heard of this book? Apparently not.
"What?!" he sat up, alarmed. "Why the violence?"
charming huh?
So once I explained it he grinned, "Oh, Suzy needs a bridge to Teribithia and Kat needs to kill a mockingbird."

Have you had any recent misunderstandings regarding punctuation?