The New York Times periodically makes verbal mistakes of the sort I feel the need to exegete and file under “Wackness.”  This latest might be called The Case Of The Invisible Punctuation.  Or, even better, The! Case: Of, The? Invisible; Punctuation.

In “A Corporate Culture Cornfed on Greed,” Manhola Dargis’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s new tragicomedy The Informant (Matt Damon = a greedy white dude screwed by his own greed), we are told:

Notably, there’s no punctuation mark in the title of Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant: A True Story,” though there might as well be.

And yet a colon (:) clearly separates the book’s title from its subtitle. Hrrm.

Last time I checked, a colon counted as a punctuation mark. True, it’s doing its job here by quietly linking a sort of super-sign (the book’s title) to an appositional, paratextual fact (that the book is based on the downfall of a real biotech exec at ADM).

But no matter how quietly it does its magic on us when we glance over it, the colon is still a mark of punctuation; it indicates a slight pause after the first sign; it asks us to prepare to analogically link that sign to something yet to come…

And yet it would be nitpicking to put Dargis on blast merely for making a mistake. I get it: There’s no exclamation point in Eichenwald’s title, and there is in Soderbergh’s. He so crazy!

So why doesn’t Dargis’s sentence read “there’s no exclamation point in the title?” Are we afraid to write the names of our punctuation marks? Is the exclamation point really all that bad, that its name must be an anathema and its presence obfuscated, even in an article which begins with a discuss of, wait for it, exclamation points!?

The exclamation point, she serves a noble purpose, especially circumscribed within the interrobang (!? or wtf mark). Without her, our zany cartoons would be far less zany. Just look at any comic book.  Without the exclamation point, our ZAM!s, ZOT!s, POW!s, KERPLINK!s, SCHLORP!s, FAP!s, BAMF!s, FUNF!s, and SNIKT!s would affect us less; and the deaths and introductions of our most brightly clad heroes would be, not STUNNING! or AMAZING!, but merely STUNNING, which word on its own, naked, brings to mind not so much the power of the imagination to redecorate the night journey again and again for successive generations of young dreamers, but the power of a Tazer. To stun you.

Or is it that the colon is really so invisible that she cannot be mentioned by a professional reviewer!? Is the colon the bad seed!? Has the colon lost her syntactical judo-prowess, the ability to shoot information forward: To motivate terms, face-first, into other terms, creating bold new chimeras of logic, new tangles of gestalt super-words!?

Gentle reader, I leave it to you to scorn these marks or to scorn those who abstain from naming them. For my part, I will continue to defend them reflexively, perhaps stupidly, the way a mother panda defends her sons’ bamboo-cud sculptures, long after the sons themselves have been captured to display in San Diego.

God damn you, San Diego. And long live the quiet colon:  And her sister, the mark of wtf!?

Francis Bacon did us a solid when he wrote a little number called “Of Envy,” an essay that pretty much trashes haterism and covetousness to death with a lead pipe of logic.

That being said, I am still well envious of commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal, who provide the meat of a New York magazine investigation into the murky depths (well, mostly shallows) surrounding the city.

Two highlights of this superb submarine report are The Case Of The Spilled Silver Ingots (in 1903, a barge between Staten Island and New Jersey capsized, spilling 7,678 silver ingots; 6,000 were reclaimed; the rest, worth $26 million, are still down there) and The Case Of The Sunken Ice-Cream Truck Armada (in 1969, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a fleet of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach in order to build an artificial reef).

Even more envy-inciting is the work of filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy, who’s dived beneath the Hagia Sophia, discovering 800-year-old submerged graves, secret Ottoman tunnels, and possible connections to the Anemas Dungeons, where Byzantine Emperors imprisoned each other for fun.

Granted, this is a free country, more or less; I could go swimming every day and apply for a job with the Underwater Eel Police, or whatever the proper department may be. Granted, my envy could be mitigated by action.

But I’m lazy, and I’m terrified of not being able to see more than a foot in front of me—and of dodging booze-cruise yachts, and encountering the aquatic octo-rats that have surely evolved off the Brooklyn coast. (Octo-rats always wanna battle, even though they can’t rhyme in English, and I don’t understand F’thskreek, their ink-twitch language.)

Green-eyed landlubber, I suppose, I’ll remain.

Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty win an Honourable Badge of Merit, not for chiding us that our handwriting is spastic, nor for implying that this is due to a degenerating decade and a half of instant messaging and texting, but for finally explaining to me why the fuck it’s so hard to read traditional “cursive,” or, as I think of it, confusing word spaghetti.

The answer is that we read the tops of characters to determine their meanings. We don’t read the bottoms. Loop all the tops together, and you have a senseless bird-language. Write the upper halves of letters cleanly, and you have the language of Samuel Johnson, bell hooks, and fictional wise-acre Peter Griffin. (Loop the bottoms of words together, and you may have ill graffiti. Depends on your handstyle.)