I thank my dear aunt Terry for circulating this most fabulous piece of art. This article so beautifully and hilariously captures what I love so much about grammar; its purpose, its sole reason for being, is to aid us in our omnipresent and cumbersome task of expressing what it is we really mean to say.
How adorable is this description of the much-maligned, and frequently misunderstood, semicolon?
It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another? And then (in the case of William James) another? And another? And one more? Which sounds, of course, dreadful, and like just the sort of discourtesy a writer ought strenuously to avoid. But the truth is that there can be something wonderful in being festooned in carefully balanced bags; there’s a kind of exquisite tension, a feeling of delicious responsibility, in being so loaded up that you seem to have half a grocery store suspended from your body.
Positively brilliant.
life and puppies 