Friday Funnies: The Semicolon

[theemdash]

A graphical explanation on how to use a semicolon, provided by The Oatmeal.

Here's a teaser—click the image for the complete explanation!



How to Use a Semicolon: The Most Feared Punctuation on Earth

Comments

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

That's such a wonderful, user-friendly, and humorous breakdown of punctuation that often confuses people!

I'll let the inimitable Vladimir Nabokov awe us with this discursive but relevant demonstration of DOUBLE SEMICOLONS from his novel Pnin:

As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian ladies, scattered all over academic America, who, without having had any formal training at all, manage somehow, by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce, to infuse a magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students in an atmosphere of Mother Volga songs, red caviar, and tea; nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain elaborate machines.

[moon-raven2.livejournal.com]

I absolutely love semicolons, and I have trouble understanding why people are so afraid of them! When I saw this poster from the Oatmeal a while back, I almost died laughing.

Virginia Woolf was probably queen of the semicolon. She would write entire (long) paragraphs with only one or two periods.

[moon-raven2.livejournal.com]

Oh, PS: While you're browsing the Oatmeal, read the one about printers being sent from Hell. Every single thing he says is so, so true.