Re: American semicolons

On Jun 28, 2:43 pm, Joe Fineman <jo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Vinny Burgoo <hlu...@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
An entertaining article/thread/blogpost/whatever they're called
about Godwin's Law at The Blackboard, a climate blog, includes a
claim that Americans 'only use ";" to separate two things that would
otherwise individually qualify as full sentences'.

I was taught in school, and I think most Americans are, that a
semicolon can be a strong comma as well as weak period.  If there ever
was a need for strong commas, it is in the sentence quoted.

*** Now that I think of it, I think you all will enjoy the fact that
this is supposedly one sentence:

It is one sentence.

'With tired, tedious mendacity, it recites the UN’s profitable but
baseless mantra that warming of the world’s climate is “unequivocal”;
that the industries and enterprises of humankind are principally to
blame; and that unless World Government mends our ways the planet is
doomed to an ineluctable cascade of difficulties, disasters,
catastrophes, cataclysms, Armageddons, and apocalypses worthier of St.
John the Divine at his most imaginative than of a businesslike
Elliptical Office facing the real and pressing problems that will
shortly arise from the President’s gleeful, Peronistic
Zimbabweanization of what was once the world’s greatest economy.'

That sort of thing is out of fashion nowadays, and people who attempt
it usually don't do it well.  To see it done well, open Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall_ to any page:

    The battlements or bastions were shaped in sharp angles; a
  ditch, broad and deep, protected the foot of the rampart; and the
  archers on the rampart were assisted by military engines: the
  _balista_, a powerful cross-bow, which darted short but massy
  arrows; the _onagri_, or wild asses, which, on the principle of a
  sling, threw stones and bullets of an enormous size.
--
---  Joe Fineman    jo...@xxxxxxxxxxx

||:  It's not who you know, it's whom.  :||

We, yes, it can be a "strong comma", but only in a situation in
which there are a lot of commas already and it's necessary to
distinguish one bunch of comma-related phrases from another.

In that case, the (would-be) comma between them gets brevetted
to a semicolon. But mostly it's used in the way Lewis Thomas
says in his deathless 'Notes on Punctuation'
(http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/punctuation.html)

"I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells
you that there is still some question about the preceding full
sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the
Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a
semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if
you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got
all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along.
But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of
expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer."

-John Lawler * Linguistics @ umich.edu
"The great thing about human language is that it
prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Macro crashing on different computer
    ... >ConsecutiveDelimiter, Tab, Semicolon, Comma, Space, ... >FieldInfo, DecimalSeparator, ThousandsSeparator) ...
    (microsoft.public.excel.programming)
  • Re: Cannot multiselect programmatically?
    ... I am just using the semicolon to separate the items in the list (and to end ... > comma-delimitd list but the comma is not part of the list value. ... >> items in the listbox already selected by default when the form is loaded. ... How do I programmatically select multiple items in the list? ...
    (microsoft.public.fox.programmer.exchange)
  • Re: Find and Replace with Wildcards
    ... This starts with a semicolon, finds everything but a semicolon and comma up ... A peer in "peer to peer" support ... > I turned wildcards on and did a find and replace using the following> values for starters: ...
    (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement)
  • Re: comma operator
    ... may have returned has been discarded by the comma; ... and the semicolon at the end discards the value ... extra gyrations to make the second function ...
    (comp.lang.c)
  • Re: defining macro template
    ... I can accomplish the same mechanism with this pointer-to-value ... the syntax error. ... you have an extraneous semicolon after the function ...
    (comp.lang.c.moderated)