Friday Funnies: The Semicolon

Jul 30, 2010 17:28

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

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


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!comics, usage:punctuation, punctuation:semi-colon, author:theemdash

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campylobacter July 30 2010, 22:51:20 UTC
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.

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