Monday, February 3, 2020

Goodnight commas

The title of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon is without a vocative comma. Now that our household has a new copy of the book (where’s the old one?), I can attest that the text, too, is comma-free. And nearly punctation-free: just one em-dash and two pairs of quotation marks, for the quiet old lady’s hushes.

Goodnight stars

Goodnight air

Goodnight commas everywhere

comments: 2

Josh said...

No "goodnight telephone" to be found. /trivia

Michael Leddy said...

That’s curious — thanks. And there is “Goodnight light,” though the lamp is never named. The more I read this book, the more mysterious and evocative it gets.