“Going By the Dots.” And get lost.
“You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.”
― Sacha Guitry
In my early classes of elementary school, I had a Frensh teacher. We had dictation always in the first period. So, to teach us grammar, and spelling, at the beginning, he used to articulate on each word he pronouciates it , so that we had to learn the sounds, and to vocalize on the vowels, consonses, and the likes. Then, when it came to reading, and writing, and how long it tates to stop to breathe at the period, colon, semi-colon, and all the bataclan, things became complicated. It became harder,and harder. Furthermore, not only he articulated each word, but also he pronounced the ponctuation name. For eg: when the phrase ended, by a period; he said ” period,” some pupils wrote the word( period), others wrote it, plus the dot, and so on. It took sometime, to the classe to get along with all the charabia_gebbrish thing. But the funny part of it was, when the ponctuations were replaced by the silent stops in place of the dot, and the length of time it took to breath, so as the confusion settled for the longest, as the speed of the dictation gained momentum, and the time of the stops diminished, for the pupils it was whither to place it, whether to choose between a comma, a colon, or semi-colon.
The anecdotal, finally; at one dictation, the teacher went so fast on reading the text, that one of the pupils namely Toto himself, omitted literally all of the ponctuations at once, but he put them all at the end of the last line of the dictation. Without omitting to put a note to the teacher: please, put them where they belong , before giving back his copy to the teacher Period
_ Toto and, The Pearls of Sasha Guitry
_”Where are my ponctuations, damn it!”
Mackneen, The Algerian Goldfinch 