Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
like a sexy, dangerously unhinged miss marple
To My Readers
Check out my website.
About Me
- Scenester
- I'm a comedian and writer for The Onion and Someecards, based in New York most of the time. When I told people I was going to be living in Botswana for a year, they thought it would be a really good joke to mock the comedy scene in Botswana. It was a mediocre joke, but an excellent blog name.
Label Cloud
Blog Archive
-
▼
2008
(134)
-
▼
October
(21)
- Creepy words that end in -kle in honor of the day
- The ScAriEsT day of the year!!!!!
- Thou Shalt Not Covet
- Poll update
- Saint Snuffles
- Brand Names Rejected by Honest Tea:
- A fierce response to Obama's closing argument
- Scared?
- The Times was right
- Gee
- Remember when...
- David Sedaris on undecided voters
- Results of our latest poll
- Best named British knight
- It's not fair
- There's something primal in my response to these i...
- How will they find an unbiased jury?
- Bloopers!
- I have my finger on the pulse of the people who re...
- Relax, Pelosi
- On punctuation
-
▼
October
(21)
Crying? Try Comedy.
- my website (not really comedy)
- ghost toast
- currently in preproduction
- conversations with deb
- artful stew
- moonwel ot cosideme
- jake rake
- hatethefuture
- the beast of T_____
- methodlogical
- caligula vs. nero
- the nang yorker
- bear o'snark
- fuck you penguin
- dooce
- new yorker cartoon lounge
- the apiary
- the onion
- superdeluxe
6 comments:
Semicolons fill out the spectrum of connective punctuation, allowing the expression of broader range of relationships between clauses. Some may argue (as Donald Barthelme in a recent post of yours does in a concise, if not thorough, way) that only periods and commas are needed for expressing connections between independent and dependent clauses; semicolons are a crutch for those who lack sufficient command of the English language. While I agree that from a purely axiomatic point of view the semicolon is, perhaps, unnecessary, I propose that the semicolon's superfluous position in the brotherhood of punctuation lends it significance that the others have to a lesser degree, if at all. How much more interesting is to read a sentence that uses a semicolon where a period and two sentences, or a comma and conjunction, would have sufficed? Why did the author construct that sentence in that way? What are the semantic threads, signified by the semicolon, tying those two clauses together? Syntactic insignificance and semantic importance are one and the same. Because the semicolon straddles the syntactic-semantic border, it occupies a fascinating and unique place in the English language.
I will leave the discussion to the experts, like jme2103 and:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregion/18semicolon.html
http://www.dictionaryevangelist.com/2008/02/semicolon-appreciation-society.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Features/Columns/?article=DefenseSemicolon
http://dailytri.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/why-writers-need-the-semicolon/
Anyway there are more, but I just wanted to note that you are obviously in the minority with your semicolon hatred.
actually i take it all back. semicolons do serve one very important purpose: ;to signal that a sentence will end in an exclamation point!
yeah the question is really more about your bizarre prejudices. did a semicolon kill your family or something?
The only real reason semi-colons exist is because they serve a particular (and once important) function. If (when?) they cease to exist, then it will be because their function has disappeared. Which many people (i.e. the French, who care a great deal about this sort of thing) would regret because it means the end (so goes the theory) of a certain type of prose, the end of Flaubert and Proust and blah blah. But punctuation fads are always being born and dying out (like the brilliant expressive Victorian dash-combos: --! and --: and cetera). Those fads are in due course replaced by new permutations (?!, as in wtf?!, f'rexample).
My gut feeling is we can count on the semi-colon struggling on for a little while longer, despite its general decline, simply because there is still sometimes a need for the kind of classical balance only a semi-colon can provide. Anyhow, I don't see why the problem needs to excite one's prejudices one way or the other. The sentence that needs a semi-colon will get one; the sentence that doesn't need a semi-colon will be written without it.
also, some evidence that Maureen Dowd doesn't dig the point-virgule:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19dowd.html?em
Shocking! Comma splice! Maybe jonly proving that, as many journalists, she is paying more attention to Dickens's plot than his prose style.
You said a while back that Dowd losing it, but now I'm actually convinced.
Post a Comment