Halfway House
There's a recent piece in Slate called Has Modern Life Killed The Semicolon? I don't think so, at least not yet. It won't be dead while I'm around.
I don't understand this semicolon-hatred. It's a splendid punctuation mark; functional, efficient, even aesthetically pleasing. It splits sentences into two separate yet connected parts or divides the elements of a list where commas would be confusing. It's less abrupt than a colon, more determined than a comma. It solves a lot of problems. And it's not a johnny-come-lately; it's only about fifty years younger than the colon which it supplements.
People who denigrate it are misguided. Wrong, even. They don't have to use it if they don't want; they're not going to keep me from doing so.
I don't understand this semicolon-hatred. It's a splendid punctuation mark; functional, efficient, even aesthetically pleasing. It splits sentences into two separate yet connected parts or divides the elements of a list where commas would be confusing. It's less abrupt than a colon, more determined than a comma. It solves a lot of problems. And it's not a johnny-come-lately; it's only about fifty years younger than the colon which it supplements.
People who denigrate it are misguided. Wrong, even. They don't have to use it if they don't want; they're not going to keep me from doing so.
posted by pyramus | 1:34 PM
2 Comments:
Tangential, but not totally unrelated: the endangered copyeditor
. See, you're not the only one who noticed!
I thought I was the only one who noticed those two articles. It's a good thing I subscribe to the school of thought that says "Everything is going to hell, and what's more, it always has been," or else I'd become awfully depressed.
Instead, I took some comfort from today's Salon article about Gore Vidal, in which they got one right. How pretty is this?
"Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?" he wonders in a review of "In the Beauty of the Lilies."
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