Laurent

I think you'll agree that this thread deserves 'bumping'

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.” …

In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.

But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.

In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.

“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said. …

People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction.

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

The linguist Noam Chomsky sniffed, “I suppose Bush would claim it’s the effect of No Child Left Behind.”

New York City Transit’s unintended agenda notwithstanding, e-mail messages and text-messaging may jeopardize the last vestiges of semicolons. They still live on, though, in emoticons, those graphic emblems of our grins, grimaces and other facial expressions.

The semicolon, befittingly, symbolizes a wink.

A missing semicolon, and goodbye clientele...

http://signsoflife.goose24.org/?sign=234

Thank you, Elena, for yet another sign of life. I was unaware that the semicolon could arouse such strong feelings in people:  

"If I were linguistic emperor," says Michael Tomasky, who recently took over as editor of the unabashedly liberal The American Prospect, "not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we'd all be writing like [18th-century Scottish historian Thomas] Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I'm on some sort of drug. What writing today does that? Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas."

How to avoid linguistic emperors and pompous sillies:

The semicolon and other tricky punctuations explained with easy to understand examples. Please see:

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/adv_tech_wrt/resources/sentence_style/semicolons.htm

Originally written by Nanna Mercer on February 21, 2008 5:53 PM   People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers.

See also Post #135200 on the comma war.

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In her description of the translation process, Lucja Biel (http://accurapid.com/journal/44freelancer.htm) points out that as part of the quality assurance the translator should

from her translation.

Right. However, there are still organizations, believe it or not, that use double spacing after a period (full stop to Brits). Originally, those who learned typing on typewriters, at least in the United States, were taught to use two spaces after a sentence-ending period for a better readability, to help people distinguish between sentence-ending periods and abbreviation-ending periods, etc. With word processors these considerations are gone, however see a discussion of this at http://www.painintheenglish.com/post.php?id=68:

Also: "Because it is increasingly common for papers and manuscripts to be prepared with a single space after all punctuation marks, this spacing is shown in the examples in the MLA Handbook and the MLA Style Manual. As a practical matter, however, there is nothing wrong with using two spaces after concluding punctuation marks unless an instructor or editor requests that you do otherwise." http://www.mla.org/style/style_faq/style_faq3 (via http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/80607)

Otherwise, like Lucja, I only find recommendations on the Web for the use of a single space after all punctuation marks, e.g.: "Double spaces date back to the days of typewriters, when all characters were allotted the same amount of space. Computerized typesetting adjusts the spacing for a good fit. Extra spaces create gaps and look unprofessional." http://www.utexas.edu/visualguidelines/punctuation.html

Jacek

Back to

Has modern life killed the semicolon?

http://www.slate.com/id/2194087/

Yes, and what do you do when the source has double spacing?

I usually remove the double spacing, but I always have an uneasy feeling that I am in the wrong.

Nanna