For the Love of Semicolons!
an email group welcoming
- prude and prissy prescriptivists,
- conjugal conjugators,
- high-flying grammar acrobats (including those of the French school),
- post-post-structural pan-punctuationalists,
- sycophantic soliloquists singing strange syntax,
- always-already alliterating assholes,† and
- cunning linguists in all flavors everywhere, when you get right down to it.‡
- prude and prissy prescriptivists,
- conjugal conjugators,
- high-flying grammar acrobats (including those of the French school),
- post-post-structural pan-punctuationalists,
- sycophantic soliloquists singing strange syntax,
- always-already alliterating assholes,† and
- cunning linguists in all flavors everywhere, when you get right down to it.‡
This is the movement for folks unafraid to reject—even now with his passing—Mr. Vonnegut's perjorative labeling of the nimble, noble marks as "transvestite hermaphrodites."
"Be a bonafide Semicolon Champion;
join the celebration—the uprising—today!"
Q:
Am I one of those possibly scorned people for whom the name E.
B. White does not recall the celebrated creative imagination behind
America's most cherished children's tale, Charlotte's Web,
but rather images of a stalwart standard bearer, the strong,
straight-talking, precision-picking Malone to Strunk's
rolling-home, job-well-done Stockton—and if you, Gideon-like,
have placed copies of that definitive duo's style bible on the back
of the toilet, in your backpack, by the bed in case a burglar
breaks-in, and one never-opened, cased in plastic copy at the top
of the otherwise disarrayed bookshelf? Am I?
A:
If you answered 'yes,' 'sometimes,' 'maybe,' 'not sure,' or
'once in the last year' to any of the above questions, you are one
of the rare candidates well qualified to join our social support
group and advocacy network! You have been chosen among thousands of
contestants. Your answer is clear.
Soon you will be giggling over the gaffs of goons, groaning over swapped pet peeves, putting to practical use tawdry tips and tantalizing textual tricks, and puzzling over splicing controversies in discussions that plumb the depths of the punctual soul living a life well punctuated. Most importantly, you will be contributing the gift of your own uniquely valuable perspective! See representative samples of the fun below.
Sample Post #1
"I received a written request from a client today asking me to 'Check grammer[stet] on the first page!!!'; I nearly handed it right back, requesting he do likewise. [laugh outloud] Hey, while I'm here, I may as well ask: did we ever get a consensus on period sex? Yes or no? The poll got pulled from the homepage."
Sample Post #2
"Yo, you guys! When you've got some time to kill, check out this site at phrontistery.info! I stumbled across it and got sucked in. I must've spent a good half hour geeking out in there after my illiterate, psycho-babbling boss yelled at me about getting behind on my TPS reports, and now the feces is going to make direct and forceful contact with the you-know-what, but I don't care; it was worth it. (Catch that deft deployment of a semi, there, boys and girls? Oh yeah, baby.)"
Sample Post #3
"I have to disagree with the guy who wrote. 'The only bad semi-colon is a dead semi-colon.' I'd rather the semi-colon died than go on living between the end of a statement and a closing parenthesis. Until the emoticontagion is irradicated, the semi-colon will never die."
"I received a written request from a client today asking me to 'Check grammer[stet] on the first page!!!'; I nearly handed it right back, requesting he do likewise. [laugh outloud] Hey, while I'm here, I may as well ask: did we ever get a consensus on period sex? Yes or no? The poll got pulled from the homepage."
Sample Post #2
"Yo, you guys! When you've got some time to kill, check out this site at phrontistery.info! I stumbled across it and got sucked in. I must've spent a good half hour geeking out in there after my illiterate, psycho-babbling boss yelled at me about getting behind on my TPS reports, and now the feces is going to make direct and forceful contact with the you-know-what, but I don't care; it was worth it. (Catch that deft deployment of a semi, there, boys and girls? Oh yeah, baby.)"
Sample Post #3
"I have to disagree with the guy who wrote. 'The only bad semi-colon is a dead semi-colon.' I'd rather the semi-colon died than go on living between the end of a statement and a closing parenthesis. Until the emoticontagion is irradicated, the semi-colon will never die."
Sample Post #4
"Newbie Needs:
Who's good with compound adjectives? I've got ten bucks riding on this one. My roommate's a bit of an em-dash maven, a parenthetical purist who refuses to cue a clause with anything but a comma—you know the type: a real sourpuss...
Anywho, this morning he was going off about the popular proliferation of improper space placement before and after structural dashes in sentences. I suggested that perhaps folks did that to avoid a line break between the hyphens, and he was like 'First of all, any time a hyphen (or two, if you prefer) does not join two words and only two words to make a new single word-unit, it is called an 'en dash.' In fact, the different terms denote distinct usage of the exact, same character. I was like, 'No, you're wrong; the en dash is so named because, on a typewriter, it is the width of an N in the same typeface, which is a different width than that of the hyphen.'
So, who's got the docs to back me up? Must be a printed source, we agreed; websites don't count, or I'd be done by now."
"Newbie Needs:
Who's good with compound adjectives? I've got ten bucks riding on this one. My roommate's a bit of an em-dash maven, a parenthetical purist who refuses to cue a clause with anything but a comma—you know the type: a real sourpuss...
Anywho, this morning he was going off about the popular proliferation of improper space placement before and after structural dashes in sentences. I suggested that perhaps folks did that to avoid a line break between the hyphens, and he was like 'First of all, any time a hyphen (or two, if you prefer) does not join two words and only two words to make a new single word-unit, it is called an 'en dash.' In fact, the different terms denote distinct usage of the exact, same character. I was like, 'No, you're wrong; the en dash is so named because, on a typewriter, it is the width of an N in the same typeface, which is a different width than that of the hyphen.'
So, who's got the docs to back me up? Must be a printed source, we agreed; websites don't count, or I'd be done by now."
The revolution will not be
mis-punctuated.
Send email to semicolons@googlegroups.com or
visit http://groups-beta.google.com/group/semicolons/ for more information (or the quiet page for less).
Send email to semicolons@googlegroups.com or
visit http://groups-beta.google.com/group/semicolons/ for more information (or the quiet page for less).
†An allowance that answers (annihilates!) any ambiguity around the ample access and amiable acceptance available to even the aggressively annoying additions.
‡But the semicolon is still—and will always be—KING! As group moderator, I must warn you that semicolon-focused topics will take precedence and receive preferential treatment.
N.B Despite whatever fun you might find made by me above, I am quite unabashed and sincerely earnest about putting together a team, a consortium, an ad hod association, or justice-seeking league of supersnobs and lit clits—a pink-spank think tank—predisposed to pointless plather about the permanance of the period and the relative merits of the bookend-approach to preemptive punctu-loqution employed in other languages. Can you hang with me? Can you handle it?
