While most countries reported "enough inverted commas" for the "foreseeable future" Canada was plunged into another day of chaos after running low on full stops, and running out of commas altogether.
"For those who depend on written language this is a sad day and we call on countries with spare capacity like Britain France Germany Italy Spain and the Netherlands to quickly help us out of this dilemma as we already have had cases of mental breathlessness among those who read aloud in their heads like my mother's ex neighbour in Winnipeg who has had no punctuation at all available to her since last Friday" began the Leader in the Ottawa Gazette.
World punctuation supply has been in chaos since the accidental destruction of a year's supply of colons at the Headquarters of the World Punctuation Federation. Use of textual emoticons (e.g.":-)") has also been blamed on "instability" in the system "with inverted commas remaining untouched" according to "experts". In fact the current ready availability of "speech marks" as some call them has led to an unprecedentedly "cynical" tone in much of the so called "media".
Some countries have addressed a "glut" of question marks by distributing them to young unemployed people to use experimentally at the end of non question type sentences? (There has also been a minor shortage in right handed brackets leaving digressions in mid air. Meanwhile lack of commas has hit supermarkets hard, with many customers unable to make shopping lists. And people with doublebarelled names have been asked to use online banking rather than sign cheques, which could lead to what experts call a danger of "hyphensiphoning".
Those living in "Punctuation rich" countries like New Zealand have been accused of noisily "flaunting" their freedom to punctuate, despite denials.
"Cr*p, cr*p, cr*p (and more cr*p!!!)" wrote N.Z. columnist, J.M.F 0' Hara* "Who says?!....."
*(known to his friends as "Bam-Bam")
