Nice piece in Slate about semicolons, and it includes this lovely bit..
Semicolons do have some genuine shortcomings; Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, once noted to the Financial Times that "[t]he most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism, is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." All journalists can cop to this: The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.
I like semicolons and I'm sure I overuse them; this is bad.
About Me
- SleepingMan
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- I've lived in Australia, US, UK and Singapore and I've been to North Korea, Ukraine, Colombia. I live in a very sparsely-furnished flat in Sydney. I have a real job (and a graduate degree from an Ivy League university) and in my spare time I play piano, think too much and play tennis. I'm actively trying to make my life more bizarre.
2 comments:
This is the very reason I return to your blog. Semi-colons, like the apostrophe, rocks. And let's not even start with commas!
You are indeed a scholar and gentlemen.
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