Oh, Joomla! For those who don’t know, Joomla! is the second most popular content management system (CMS) on the internet — a distant second to WordPress, which is what we use here at Frankly Curious. But it causes constant problems for me in my professional work, because I have to deal with sentences like this, “The three most popular CMSs are WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.” You will probably see the problem: I hate following an exclamation mark with a comma.
But the word doesn’t have to have an exclamation mark. It could be a period, for example. Suppose some idiot marketing guru decided that a new company should be called Stop. — with the period as part of the name. Imagine that! “The three more stupid recent company names are Pause,, Stop., and What?” The one thing you can say about that is at lease “Pause,” and “Stop.” are clear. But they are only clear because they aren’t at the end of the sentence. Okay, “Pause,” would be clear: “The three more stupid recent company names are What?, Stop., and Pause,.”
Minor Problems Still Need Solving
These are the things that I think about. A lot. These are also the kinds of things that make people create (or at least use) style guides. Unfortunately, having come up in the book publishing business, I’ve only had The Chicago Manual of Style around for decades. It’s only in the last year or so that I bought The Associated Press Stylebook. But it doesn’t matter. I cannot find the issue addressed in either book.
Sure, it’s a minor issue. It doesn’t come up that much — even for me. But for months, I’ve been bouncing around, looking for a good solution. There isn’t one as far as I can tell. In the original sentence above, I could just say that the serial comma is not necessary when the next to last item ends with a punctuation mark, “The three most popular CMSs are WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal.” But that doesn’t solve the general problem. And it gives me one more special case to remember. Also: it looks terrible.
Potential Solution
What is to be done? I’ve looked around, and the consensus seems to be, “Whatever feels right at the time.” The most common cudgel is to use the exclamation point when it is convenient and not use it when it isn’t. I don’t like this — although I’ll admit that I’ve used it a lot. A better solution would be just to decide that the people who named Joomla! are stupid and that the name is simply “Joomla.” Intellectually, I like this solution very much.
Emotionally, I hate it. These nitwits decided that the name of their product is “Joomla!” Shouldn’t I respect that? Would I like it if people started calling me “George”? Admittedly, I would be innocent in this regard. There’s no reason to call me “George”; I don’t go around calling myself “Frank#@!”! And there is a very good reason for not calling me Fran: Fran Moraes.
Joomla It Is!
So I’ve decided something for this case alone. Hang on a second and I will put it in my style book… Okay, it’s done: “Joomla!” is now “Joomla.” The funny thing is that before I dictated that it always be “Joomla!” But really: could anyone be confused? “Joomla? What is this Joomla? I’ve heard of Joomla!, but never Joomla. I wonder what it could be?!” No one would be thusly confused.
Now I understand: I am effectively giving all the Joomla developers the middle finger. But I really don’t care. If their name was something common like “wow,” then I could see it. But Joomla is the English equivalent of the Swahili word “jumla,” which means “wholesale” as in “total.” It doesn’t need the exclamation mark. It isn’t a word that is in any English language dictionary.
Beyond This Case
But I am bothered by the larger issue. For example, as far as I know, Orson Welles wanted the name of his film F for Fake to be ?. See the problem? But you probably don’t need to worry about such things. Even most editors don’t worry about such things. And if Kurt Gödel taught us that algebra was ultimately inconsistent, how could we hope for English to be so? But I’ll continue to lie awake thinking about these matters. At least I have “Joomla” dealt with.
The next time someone asks me why I use WordPress, I have a great response, “Because there is no punctuation in its name.” It certainly isn’t because it’s a bad CMS. It is, in fact, a great CMS. I still need to come up with a reason for not using Drupal. Maybe, “It’s spelled wrong”?
Schumer’s idea is a faithful reflection of the way Congress thought about politics years ago, when Schumer was coming up through the system. It’s a totally plausible model, which assumes that vulnerable members of Congress can shore up their standing by proving to their constituents that they can win concrete achievements. That is how Schumer has built a career, and he wants to help Democrats in red states do the same, by finding some bills where they can shake hands with Trump and cut ribbons on some bridges, and so on. Schumer’s idea can be boiled down to: