Smilies, or emoticoms if you prefer, that accentuate communications in today's internet age, give evidence to a growing desire for more symbolism to embellish our written language. Some may say that the use of such figures is borne from laziness, indicative of a willful ignorance of the dictionary and is a practice to be shunned. Some may say it exercises expressive visual creativity and should be encouraged. Some may say it is just better than spelling .

Personally I think emoticoms are a step in the right direction toward expression but are only half-way to need. Nothing new is created but re-arrangements of the old. While the ubiquity of eMail is making written communications more conveniently immediate, expressive creativity is still being stifled by the limitations of the keyboard. Mere words often fall short in our needs to express. It is time to re-integrate the fluidity of the humble pen into our correspondence.

Toward that end and in the spirit of inventiveness exhibit by Martin K. Specter when he created the interrobang, I decided to coin a new phrase, constructive punctuation.

There is a vast need for new symbols to punctuate creative thought. It is about time somebody commenced filling it. That it needs it. Some creative filling that is.

I invite visitors to notice the graphic I used for the background of my home page. It is a styling of one of nature's puzzles. If you must try to figure out the basis of the form, search out information on Fibonacci and "his" spirals, Golden Sections and their natural occurrences, and last but not least, the noble little Greek-letter-symbol phi and its place in mathematics. Caution is urged. Therein lies the makings of the sort of potential obsession that can ruin (or make) a person's life. There are many web sites devoted specifically to one and/or all of those principles. My home page horn-of-plenty background melds all three.

I like to think of that interpretation of a cornucopia as a background punctuation mark. The inclusion of the cornucopia into any graphic is apt to inspire thoughts of plenty and sources thereof. I am not certain exactly how, but think it pretty much sums up the term constructive punctuation. As if possible, I hereby copyright the use of the cornucopia figure as a web page background. It lends such a wonderfully flowing definition to intention. Hmmmm.

Work is underway to build a separate workshop for efforts of constructive punctuation.

To further the creative ball a little farther, I suggest that there exists a need for a new mark of punctuation to represent the closing feelings of "to be continued". I propose to call it the "2B" or "tobe". This concept has proven to confuse even such great writers as Wm Shakespeare. He solved the "not to be" part easily enough by using the period, but unfortunately the counterpart brought him the ignoble sufferings of slinging arrows. You didn't know what that soliloquy was really about, now did you? Isn't it nice to have someone to educate?

Right after the pieced together arrow, I offer a very clumsy squiggle, loosely based on the number 2, as a suggestive start toward a pattern of construction for the punctuation, "tobe" _=}}}=====>