I use them a lot to control the tone of what I write. Since periods can indicate a serious or angry tone[1], I often need some other way to indicate a separation between two complete sentences. For example: "It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y." Using a period could be perceived as anger, but using a comma would make that sentence a comma splice.
I wish there were more symbols for other use cases, too. I honestly think the standardization of things in the 20th century actually prevented lots of innovations in language and alphabet. Nowadays, you can't even imagine adding or removing a letter to/from the alphabet. Heck, we can't even change the layout of the current alphabet on keyboards because QWERTY is just too much standardized. In fact, forget about alphabet; we can't even change the symbols on keyboards (who says I must only use `~!@#$%^&* ... on my keyboard?) Sure you can use unicode characters, but why haven't the special characters on keyboards changed at all since the 80s? The answer: standardization.
The evolution of languages, words, alphabets, and special characters helped shape the way we think about things, and since the 20th century, that hasn't changed that much.
I totally agree with you. I like using symbols to shape the way I think, and I find using AutoHotKey to to expand typed strings works well for my workflow. Stuff like "qbeta", "qright", "qdegree" and "q@" become β, →, °, and my email. Very useful when I was in university.
These days, I use it to type stuff like (ﾟヮﾟ ) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and a black box symbol that HN won't let me type, but is eye catching for when you're scanning logs. Symbols like checkmark, ×, the thinking emoji, and the hourglass are useful when taking notes.
Lots can be found in the Windows 10 emoji finder (Win + Period), but AHK is more customizable. Also WinPeriod is juuuuust that much more friction and I find AHK fits into my flow better. This flow shapes the way I think.
I've been using AHK and snippets (in VS Code) __a lot__. TBH, this functionality should ship with the OS.
Instead of having separate AHK scripts, I have "one script to rule them all". When Windows launches, "my precious" loads all my scripts. Many of them I use in MS Word.
The one that gets me is that we have basically three variants of dash/hyphens. And double quotes have to do the duty of about four different use cases.
And the fact that there are two types of double quotation marks (“opening and closing”), but those are squashed into a third " symbol on the keyboard—blame the typewrite for that one.
In all seriousness, I think standardizing letters and symbols has done a lot to promote basic literacy. And there are plenty of language innovations like slang, emojis, kaomoji, new words like email, the prevalence of alternate text treatments like bolds, italics, underlines, strikethroughs, etc etc.
Wow never really knew this. I guess you need to have deep understanding of the language and maybe have English as your mother tongue to pick up on such things. No wonder text is so emotionless and people misread and get angry about what they think it means all the time. Yet, nobody misreads the tone of your voice or facial expressions.
Like in India we have a very common expression "I'm writing to intimate you.." which my American boss got really angry to read. For us it just means i'm writing to tell you, but many people esp from older gen use this a lot here to sound cool.
While "intimate" can mean be familiar or familial, "intimidate" is a much more common and threatening word; due to being so much more common I can imagine it would be easy to misread and get a very different feeling from what you had intended. "I am writing to intimidate you..." is definitely not a good message to send to your boss.
> No wonder text is so emotionless and people misread and get angry
Native speakers definitely struggle with this as well. There is a diffucult balance between being too succinct (curt, impolite) and excessively wordy (feels forced or contrived, muddles the message).
Personally, when I communicate st work, I tend to phrase things as questions- either as a standalone comment or as a preamble to my argument. That way, I am (hopefully) clear that I am trying to be inclusive, rather than divisive, and I think it makes people less likely to project emotion from their own assumptions into what I write.
Indian English has retained some strong markers from the British colonial period. There's no clear guide for how prestige and emulation will affect usage, but "to intimate" in either verbal form is a literary archaism in North American English.
>"to intimate" in either verbal form is a literary archaism in North American English
While the second (intransitive) version from that wiktionary page is Indian, the first use is most certainly not an archaism in North American English. In fact, it was listed as a normal definition in the first dictionary that Google returned with a definition.[0] The pronunciation does shift with which definition we intend, which nicely keeps "intimate details" from sounding too much like "mating". :-)
> the first use is most certainly not an archaism in North American English
I understand your point and applaud your literacy. However, it's not a verb in common usage, and if our friend is using the verb to intimate in North American business English in any sense, I would advise him that the term is an archaism.
We can discuss at further leisure whether any given literary usage has at least one foot in the crypt of liberal education. ^_^
OED shows that the Indian English usage that we are discussing definitely comes from prior British English acceptations.
> which nicely keeps "intimate details" from sounding too much like "mating". :-)
OED also offers "one who intimates" to be an "intimater". (o;
Or Swedish :- ) Semicolon works in the same way, in Swedish. I think I didn't know much about the semicolon, though, until I had read a few books (in Swedish) about writing books (in Swedish).
Former professional journalist and tech writer here. Disagree. At least since Hemingway brief sentences using periods instead of complicated sentences separated by semicolons has been considered not particularly angry. Short sentences also reduce cognitive load on the reader.
It’s not that they’re a danger or anything. It’s that you write in a certain way to convey a certain tone and short, period punctuated, sentences is just how you convey anger. You can try to fight the river on this one but it’ll be tough.
The only people using “txt” speak without punctuation is boomers. Young people communicate in complete sentences when messaging, full of memes and in-jokes sure, but not abbreviated or avoiding punctuation.
Emojis override the natural tone of the sentence. They’re used as legitimate grammar in cases where you want to write something in a tone different than the one it would be normally interpreted as.
That web page that makes combinations of emojis should also be able to combine them with punctuation, so you can make a frowning period, or a goofy semicolon, etc.
"It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y."
"It looks like you forgot to do X. That's needed to do Y."
I would actually prefer the second one here. It's neutral and to the point.
I guess the problem with the first one is that the reader might interpret the semicolon exactly in the way that you intended it, as an attempt on your behalf to "control the tone". Depending on the personal disposition of the receiver he or she may or may not like it.
Unfortunately there’s a bit of knowing your audience because you can’t really control the tone of voice inside your recipients head. To anyone who’s Millennial or younger the one with the period is straight up aggressive.
For generations that grew up as text as the primary form of communication we had to figure out how to convey tone and writing style and emojis is what we had. Tone and the expression of tone are disconnected even when speaking in person and have grammar like rules.
At some point I was taught that in English (not my first language) short sentences are the norm. Now you tell me that short sentences convey a harsh tone. What is one to do?!
I use semi-colons as a sort of conjunction, not unlike the example you gave, in part to give me a way to lengthen sentences that would otherwise seem much too short.
There's a common, but far from universal perception that ending a single-sentence text message with a period conveys an angry or serious tone. That may extend to multiple short sentences in some contexts; I'm uncertain.
My observation is that in Romance languages writers (and readers, presumably!) like to create long sentences with lots of sub-clauses. It's almost a game where you have to read the whole 50 word sentence before you can parse it fully, having to push onto a mental stack quite a lot of state that you can only pop at the very very end. So in Romance languages one often finds sentences as long as entire paragraphs are in English! That approach doesn't work well in English for a number of reasons. For example, gendered nouns/adjectives can help disambiguate various parts of a long sentence; conversely, lacking gendered nouns/adjectives makes mixing multiple subjects and/or objects in one sentence much harder to pull off without causing severe ambiguities.
Now, I can write that way in English -up to some limit to do with those ambiguities-, but when I do, I find it irritates certain readers.
A rewrite of the preceding sentence:
I can write that way in English, up to some
limit to do with those ambiguities. When I
do, I find it irritates certain readers.
which is the style I find is more commonly used in the U.S.
Usually I write sentences as they pop into my mind, then I edit them down into more numerous, shorter sentences.
> Usually I write sentences as they pop into my mind, then I edit them down into more numerous, shorter sentences.
This is interesting to me, because I do the exact opposite. I write my clauses more or less independently, then try to string the related clauses together with linking words punctuation in a way that flows naturally.
I can't imagine composing long, complex sentences on the fly, and the only people I've seen that manage to do this in conversation are unusually erudite.
"The semicolon is a profound public mystery; the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance."
That sentence should have used a colon, not a semi-colon, IIANM.
The digital world churns; Twitter is not an arena known for reflection. Semicolons, then, are snottily elitist and shadily indirect.
The elitist snottiness is in assuming people live their lives on Twitter and the like. They don't.
the semicolon has been usurped by ... the Dash
Well, _maybe_ some authors use more dashes than they used to (I actually doubt that, but never mind) - but a dash is not a substitute for semicolon. Their semantics are too different for that to be possible, IMHO. Take the first sentence in this paragraph: You can't replace the dash there with a semicolon, as that would mean splitting the "maybe" and "but" clauses into separate, not-directly-related clauses; you just can't do that.
indicating a pause
Not just a pause; a semicolon is also a semantic distancing. Two phrases separated by a comma are really an inseparable part of the same idea idea; if you separate them by a semicolon, they can each stand in their own right.
> That sentence should have used a colon, not a semi-colon, IIANM.
I think you are mistaken. The two clauses are full sentences. They could have been separated by a full-stop/period, but the semi-colon makes them part of the same "thought".
Sorry, but “the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance” is not a full sentence. It should indeed be a colon.
> Two phrases separated by a comma are really an inseparable part of the same idea idea; if you separate them by a semicolon, they can each stand in their own right.
A semicolon is a period and a comma combined. This makes me think that if the first part logically should end with a question mark or exclamation mark, we should have corresponding symbols for that.
I am seeing a use of the instruments that seems quite confused.
The semicolon is part of the division of the expression of thought in supersets and subsets of structural affinity: comma, semicolon, period, new paragraph. (Which also means that the semicolon has a necessary role in general: whenever the structure is best defined also using that level of affinity.)
The dash, the colon and the brackets are instead related to the modality of relation: the colon to express dependency, the dash to provide detail, the brackets to insert a note parallel to the main flow.
(Note: there is also a sub-function of the semicolon to separate list items. I did not use it in the paragraph just above as I intended to exploit the "nuclear" aspect of comma-separated list items, but that is a rhetorical option and the semicolon would have been necessary for more complex items.)
Did you mean `full-stop' in your 2nd paragraph, or are you ascribing a double role to the colon and ignoring the full-stop?
According to Fowler (The King's English), there was a time when the difference between , ; : . was merely quantitative (which explains the name `semicolon').
Thank you! Now corrected. Informally: incredibly, one reads and re-reads, edits multiple times in a span of hours, and still leaves errors and imprecisions. Of course it was the period or "full-stop" - in reading, also as I had defined the colon differently in the next paragraph...
By the way, you made me note that 'full-stop' is British English and 'period' is American English. As some of us prefer to write in International English - "OED", or "British spelling with -ize graecisms" in international contexts, I have never considered if there is some solid orientation also about terminology - 'full-stop' vs. 'period', 'lift' vs. 'elevator'...
"UN English" generally follows British/Oxford usage, although there are a few exceptions: writing "Mr." with the full stop, "sulfur" rather than "sulphur", "1.30 pm" (not 1:30 pm or 13:30) etc.
I think it's a decent compromise. All the Zs make it look weird to British readers, and all the Us make it look weird to Americans.
I was in college only ten years ago, and my English professor’s key insight to punctuation is that it’s to define framing and tempo for your sentences.
That the sequence you listed is the pause count — similar to different empty spaces in music. Punctuation is just the negative space to frame your thoughts!
Colon isn't a type of pause; at least, I only ever use it to introduce lists. I don't use it for timing or tonality.
This discussion makes it painfully clear to me that I over-punctuate. I mean, I knew I leant more towards elaborate sentence-construction than is fashionable; I've never liked txt-speak, and my thumbs are too fat and flabby for operating miniature virtual keyboards.
I try to write literate emails. That is also unfashionable, apparently, but I think it's considerate to the reader to use the expressive power of the language. In fact emails now seem to mostly be an alternative channel for sending txts. I think this is because of mobile apps that present the same UI for txts and emails.
So I send a carefully-considered email, with paragraphs and all that, and I get back a reply of the form "Yes! <emoticon> <emoticon>".
On semi-colons, I use them to append a clause with sentence structure (roughly subject, main verb, object) to the main part of a sentence, while keeping the two clauses together as a single "thought".
It also is a type of vocal intention. Are you acquainted with John Cleese playing the "Hungarian gentleman with phrase book" in the Monty Python sketch? «I will not buy this record [mounting pause, then release] it is scratched». The first part is preliminary, incomplete, it requires the second, expressed as a release after the mounting premise: the sentence is pronounced as having a colon (I cannot check the exact sample right now - that is how I remember it).
You can imagine the difference if it were pronounced as a dash, as a more emotionally neutral interpretation of the sentence, not stressing the implications of "the record being scratched", could bring. With colon you make the first part an incomplete premise that depends on the second part to finally gain meaning or informational value or completeness, reaching to conclusions; with dash with the second part you provide the detail that enrich the content of the first part. As a vocal intention, the musicality of the syllables would change (e.g., in «it is scratched», high-high-low vs. low-low-high), and the pause would become more of a mid-air jump suspension. (Unfortunately I do not have other examples to provide on the spot).
There can be correspondence between natural vocal intentions and punctuation - as is understandable, since punctuation very probably mimics the communicational relations implied in the acting of speech, and both are a consequence of the organization of thought.
It sounds as if you are saying that /colon/ is a pause, because in your Cleese reference, he pronounces a /colon/. If that's what you meant, then are you not begging the question? You assume that his pause was a /colon/, and conclude that /colon/ means a pause.
No. I have precisely stated that «It [relation between sentences] also is a type of vocal intention». This was stated on the basis that if you listen to a normal, decent speaker, you can see that the musicality in language can follow semantics, precisely different relations of sentences including modalities. Different relations are implied in different rhythms and melodies. You sing colons, dashes etc. as you speak.
There is no assumption: it is an obstension. There is no conclusion: it remains an obstension. That I mentioned of Cleese's acting, is an example.
I fail to see how you could read that pseudo-logic in that post. Do not use that poor pattern as a universal key: it is not.
This is an excellent comment thank you. You put into words some of my unconscious inklings. Is there any reading you can recommend on the topic that isn’t a dry grammar manual — something akin to Strunk and White, or a good blog? If not I suppose you could write one :)
Possibly related? In both usages it is seen as elitist and unnecessary. I personally use them in JS because the code is aesthetically gross without them.
Dash seems a poor substitute. A dash is closer to a period. Semicolons work well for when just using multiple commas would become ambiguous. Shorter sentences also solve that, but sometimes you want a run on sentence, sometimes you want to splice more context in at this very point. & sometimes you just want to drop a conjunction
Writing has no laws, only rules meant to be broken
English is also a descriptivist language, rather than prescriptivist. ie English has no spec, unlike French (tho you then have French as it is spoken & French as it is specified). As much as Oxford might want to reign it in, they are only cataloging what the collective spews
Using "&" in place of the word "and" does depart from common usage (though there's no "law") and does so in such an overt way that it appears pretentious.
I had to read a lot of Heidegger, who was interesting on a macro level but interminably boring on the micro level needed to see the macro. His readability was helped by the use of very visible double dashes-- sort of an extended version of the double-comma appositive structure in a sentence-- so the structure of his writing was easier to follow.
I liked that much more visual que enough that I adopted it myself for a while. Over time, I recognized that when I found myself reaching for the technique it meant that I probably needed to restructure things into more discrete chunks that build sequentially. When possible, conveying complex information benefits from as simple a structure as the information can manage.
They’re called “em dashes”, and they look like this: —
You can find a Real, Genuine Em Dash™ at https://emda.sh, or insert one using ‘C-k - M’ in Vim or ‘Compose - - -’ on Linux — not sure about other platforms.
Thanks— I didn't realize there was an actual character for them. Though IIRC MSWord would sometimes auto format them into that single extended dash appearance.
When you need to write text for a wide audience, shorter sentences are usually preferable. Most business schools even teach briefness as an explicit target, as far as I know. That's quite different compared to the origins of writing, where the target were (usually) very literate people.
Briefness does not (and cannot) go against proper structuring - structure exists regardless of brevity. Comma, semicolon, period, new paragraph: the expressed thought has a structure and its sets of relative closeness are indicated through them.
Was going to comment this. Are there any great examples in all of literature where a period would not have been a good replacement fora semicolon?
As a side note, I am only a little offended by the idea that fiction writers should use semicolons to make their writing more literate or fancy. But I think simple writing is always better, even when you are trying to convey beauty. I believe great flowery literature is great in spite of the floweriness, not because of it.
Asking for a "great example" of punctuation use - any punctuation - is to miss the point, which is to smooth the reader's understanding of the text in the way that inflection and cadence are used in speech. As another commenter pointed out, well-used punctuation should be invisible. Only in its absence can it be properly appreciated.
Understanding language is not a strictly linear, one-word-after-another process, and these non-lexical clues all help us converge quickly on the intended meaning.
There have been several suggestions as to what might be just as good as a semicolon, but the period is a new one to me, and I strongly suspect that there are many cases where this substitution would interrupt a reader's flow. Given the importance, semantically, of the sentence, there are probably cases where this would corrupt the meaning.
I agree with most of what you said, but not that you shouldn't be able to find a good example. If the only good time for it is when it doesn't matter, that sounds like the worst and most pretentious parts of literature.
It is not clear to me how you could interpret my reply as being an admission that "the only good time for it is when it doesn't matter" - my claim is something quite different, that it makes a difference in a way that does not lead to great examples. Are there great examples, as you put it, of the use of the comma? If not, should we conclude that it doesn't matter and should be replaced with something else? A period, perhaps, as you say should replace the semicolon?
I will admit, however, that I doubt a misunderstanding of this magnitude could be fixed by punctuation.
Given the viewpoint expressed by the last sentence in my original reply, I have little doubt there are examples where replacing a semicolon with a period could alter the meaning of an expression, but I am just not motivated enough to go look for one.
If, as your final sentence suggests, you feel that semicolons are characteristic of "the worst and most pretentious parts of literature", then I have bad news about just how pretentious writing can get. Writing that badly misuses semicolons might be the work of a pretentious author, but it is mainly just bad writing.
Ultimately, however, I think the semicolon will disappear: if one's readership finds it strange and it interrupts their flow, then it is counter-productive. I do not, however, think this would mean it was a bad idea; its demise will be just a consequence of the ever-shifting norm of usage in language. Furthermore, the substitution of other punctuation for the semicolon, as noted in the article, suggests that it had a purpose that remains to be satisfied one way or another.
For a couple of decades now college professors have been death on passive voice sentences, which tends to create students and then writers who avoid long sentences for fear they aren't "punchy" enough.
And the sad thing is, they don’t even know what the passive voice is! See G. K. Pullum, Fear and Loathing of the English Passive [http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html]. Their unintentional hypocrisy is quite something, e.g.:
> … it makes little difference if you decide to look at prose written by the advisers on usage themselves. Consider the beginning of E. B. White's introduction to his revision of The Elements of Style (Strunk & White 2000). I underline the head verbs of the passive VPs … Six instances of transitive verbs appear here: took, called, required, called, known, and printed. Five of them are in the passive. That's over 83 percent.
A lot of that article feels like too much of a gotcha. There is a difference between "Alice died of a gunshot wound" and "Bob fatally shot Alice". The fact that neither one is passive voice according to the author's definition doesn't mean that people are wrong for being upset if Bob is left out of the headline. It really seems like missing the point to counter complaints that Bob isn't suitably blamed in a headline by pointing out that the grammar is fine!
But it also seems like missing the point for people to criticize that headline for a grammatical error (falsely!) when they really just want Bob to be named... which is exactly the point of that article, right?
They weren't criticizing the headline for a grammatical error (after all, passive voice isn't grammatically wrong). Rather they were using incorrect grammatical terminology to express their actual complaint: that the emphasis wasn't on Bob for committing murder!
In my native language classes I was always told by my teachers to try to make shorter sentences. If I do a second pass, I always delete words or split sentences into two.
It isn't clear whether his advice here is just humor. This article goes on to explain that he uses semicolons in his own work, even in places where he didn't need to.
Completely off topic but, after doing python for ages, recently started writing Rust and semicolon does seems useless. We are doing the indentation and new lines anyway, why not just make them as default language construct as python does.
(autodidact developer here, feel free to ELI5 and enlighten me)
To be fair, that's really more of a python-specific deficiency than a general problem with significant whitespace. Haskell for example interprets further-indented lines as a continuation of the current expression, only ending the expression when it sees a new line of the same or lesser indentation.
> In Python you need to be careful to wrap that in () or use a \
I guess that's because in the REPL Python need's to know whether the line has finished yet or not. OCaml and F# uses two semicolons ';;' for that purpose, but only in the REPL. In Haskell you can use braces and semicolons or '{:' and ':}' in the REPL.
It's a lot easier to format code arbitrarily when a language is whitespace-independent.
For example, to do method chaining across multiple lines, Python requires parentheses around the whole chain. That's a quirk of being a whitespace-dependent language.
In general, I think people who advocate for braces and semicolons just find it easier to reason about the code when they know that the formatting doesn't matter. All the flow is done via visible glyphs.
Haskell has an alternative parens-and-braces syntax to the offside rule; that was meant particularly for machine-generated code if I remember correctly.
Edit: I meant to add: you need to decide whether ";" is terminates or joins statements if you have statements in the language.
It's a trade-off. You can either assume all statements end at the end of the line, and require a continuation character (backslash in Python) if that isn't the case; or you can require a statement terminator (semicolon/closing brace in Rust) for all statements.
The downside of assuming statements end at the end of the line is that you need to have special rules for when that isn't the case (such as Python's implicit statement continuation inside braces), while always having a terminator is simpler and more consistent (all statements end with a semicolon) at the cost of extra characters.
There are people who hate python because of the forced indentation. They indent their code in their language of choice, they just don't want something FORCING them to do it.
Unless you are doing this for performance reasons, this one I'll never understand.
I'd much rather type "x.someP" and hit tab then type in "x.somePropertyThatHasARidiculousNameIAlwaysForget" after having to consult the documentation yet again to get the name.
I already know what I want to type. Having something pop up with "suggestions", often obscuring the lines I need to read, is worthless to me at best and disruptive of my thinking at worst.
If I can't recall "x.somePropertyThatHasARidiculousNameIAlwaysForget" then there are other more serious problems.
> If I can't recall "x.somePropertyThatHasARidiculousNameIAlwaysForget" then there are other more serious problems.
I just prefer to press less keys. It shouldn't obscure anything in a decent IDE.
Often you are working with other people's code and having to "recall" every single property, method, etc declared is not practical, hence why I mentioned having to keep referring to the documentation for things you are not accessing very often.
If I keep forgetting that a property is .lastname and not .lastName in a library I'm using I can just type "last" and press tab.
This is even more crucial in dynamic languages like JS, where you will get a failure at runtime and not compile time.
It doesn't make you any "less of a programmer", it makes you a more efficient one once you are used to it.
That is just another layer of abstraction which leads to even more confusion.
These abstractions can be taken to the extreme in things like Java, that's how you end up with a class named "InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState".
If you wrap that in a new interface "IFIFTPIFTPMBWNFS" or even "crazyFrameStuff" (ridiculous enough), now you have to figure out what that actually is while debugging.
If one just comes to terms with the fact that Intellisense (and showing the method signatures while implementing) is extremely helpful even to very senior developers, life can be much easier.
No, I end up with classes like that because when I wrap APIs the point is to simplify, so I simplify. Though that is a last effort if ditching the broken API entirely isn't an option - e.g. if it's a third party API we can't avoid. That is rare to begin with.
You're free to find Intellisense etc. useful. I just don't. I go to great lengths to have an uncluttered view of the code when I work, because I find it far more preferable to focus on just the code. I'm not against it in principle - I've just not seen any solutions like that which works for me. I don't tend to need to look up methods much; when I work on a piece of code I tend to hold the APIs in memory pretty effortlessly, so that's just not much of a consideration.
I spent years actually looking at implementing visual languages because I liked the idea of providing more contextual information and views of information flows etc. to aid development, but I've yet to find something that works better for me than an uncluttered view of the text.
By understanding the language, so it can do magic things like "rename this field (including uses of it)" without changing other uses of the same string. As a separate operation from general find and replace, of course.
All usable editors also infer the indent levels of brace-less languages.
Sometimes you have to change that using a <tab> or <shift>-<tab>, but sometimes I have to write braces in languages with braces too.
I suppose I don't quite match the reasoning you're describing, but here's mine. I indent; I just don't want semantic meaning ascribed to whether or not I'm missing an indent. I'll handle the {}s, my editor handles the indent level, and everyone gets along fine.
Because then there'd be ambiguity between a function ending and returning unit (nothing) or returning whatever the last line expression returns. You could change things around this, but Rust has a goal of unambiguous syntax, hence also the turbofish::<>
Python and Rust have two fundamentally different philosophies. Python is all about quick and intuitive programming and it's pretty good at that, though in turn you can get more kinds of bugs and runtime errors that could have been avoided with proper type checking and other measures.
Meanwhile Rust avoids any kind of behaviour that isn't clearly visible in the code. That includes unambiguous syntax, like the mandatory curly braces for loops and conditions. And of course the semicolon as a clear separator, which comes in handy when iterators or the builder pattern are used.
I'm pretty happy with the choices made in rust and python. Just want to note that the : in Python is just as superfluous (as rubyists will tell you) and kept only for readability, not for parsing.
It uses the semi-colon to join independent clauses instead of a conjunction, which is fine. It might otherwise have read, “The semicolon is a profound public mystery, and the only punctuation mark that…”. Nevertheless, it isn’t a great showcase for the semi-colon’s usefulness. The writer could have invented a more elegant example to begin the article; the one they chose is a prime example of a semi-colon that adds little to the sentence.
The second phrase is not an independent clause, which is the issue.
> the only punctuation mark that regularly unites readers and writers in deep-seated repugnance
There is not a subject and a verb; this is a fragment and does not stand alone. Prepending "it is" to the second clause would make this a proper sentence by making the second clause an independent clause instead of merely a noun modified by an adjectival prepositional phrase.
Edit: I nerdsniped myself and it might not be strictly accurate to call it a prepositional phrase; 'that' is technically a conjunction in this case used to link its own subordinate clause, but that subordinate clause still does not complete the clause fragment whose subject is
"[punctuation] mark." It's still just a modified noun.
My favourite use of the semicolon is in its function as a "supercomma". It just makes sense.
E.g.
"We were joined by three families: John, his wife, Mary, and their son, George; the Middletons; and our neighbours, Jim and Sally from next door."
Alas, whenever I use it, invariably someone who's never seen it used this way will simply have a tantrum until I completely rewrite the whole thing in the most tedious way possible; it's almost not worth using it, for this reason alone.
As a supercomma, a semicolon is necesssary as a list-separator, if you have list-items with embedded commas. Your "three families" example is spot-on. I wouldn't know how to rewrite it, without using some Powerpoint-derived notation, such as bullet-lists, which just isn't conversational.
I’ve read some shelves in my life, and from a reader’s perspective a good read has never made me think about what punctuation the author used. This is an inside nonsense which only worries idling writers and critics.
>a good read has never made me think about what punctuation the author used
I can with certainty conclude that you have never ever read any Cormac McCarthy or Charles Dickens, and you should, if only to illustrate each extreme of the milieu which you've thus far ignored.
My goal was to read one book this year after reading none the previous couple years. My friend and I chose Blood Meridian >< and it has been a challenging foray back into the hobby/reading life that I am not sure I would choose again. Good book though for sure.
I considered Frankenstein to be a good read. Compared to the stuff I read before, Shelley's frequent use of the semicolon did startle me. And taught me its proper usage.
One should decide if one is using it because it’s the best way to communicate with one’s audience or if one is proud that one knows how to use a semicolon properly.
If your audience benefits from expressions that avoid semicolon, the point is in the expression, not in its nuts and bolts: you use an apt structure, which should anyway in general follow sensible rules. And you should not pollute the minds of your audience, so surely you want to avoid "reinforcing the use of something wrong by adopting it": you may, with ability, simplify a structure, but still crafting something eventually well and properly done. This rules out misplacing said "nuts and bolts".
Pride has nothing to do with it - to use logarithms for magnitudes is not "showing off".
I’ll double down on my original point. If, in 2021, you’re 100% sure you absolutely positively need to be using a semicolon in your writing, you need to reevaluate your position.
Why should 2021 be different than any other year. I cannot see a reason to avoid using the semicolon. It is part of proper expression - it's useful, available and innocent.
Also, it so happens that I wear a fedora. It's not an affectation, it's just a felt hat. My natural scalp insulation started to fall out a decade or so ago, so I started wearing beanies. But now I feel much more at home under a fedora - apart from anything else, the hat works as a sort of miniature umbrella.
I mean yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Use semi-colons if you want and wear a fedora if you want, but understand the image you’re putting out into the world if you do.
Whereas, how would you evaluate the image you would project, by not using semicolons (or anything that would fall into this matter of use, appropriateness and possible reactions) when appropriate, or by refusing to do it to follow the use of some not better defined writers, or for fear of the judgement of some very generically mentioned public?
Write with semicolons or wear a fedora and I can make a few (likely accurate) guesses about who you are. Either you’re OK with giving off those vibes or not.
Personally, I’m not. So I’d rather just not use semicolons.
(I.e. not "OK with giving off those vibes", I guess)
See, I don't much care what vibes I give off. If people don't like my "vibes", I find different people to associate with. I don't pair my fedora with a snappy costume; I've always been a slob as far as clothes are concerned.
In fact I was complimented only yesterday on my "ensemble", which consisted of a leather bomber jacket with a lumberjack shirt hanging out, a pair of baggy training pants, and a hat. My instinctive (and rather rude) response was that I don't wear "ensembles", that this was just random strips of fabric I had stapled to my body when I rolled out of bed.
I'm not Hemingway, although I do appreciate the value of short sentences for making prose clear and easy-to-understand. I'm not a punctuation nazi; I don't think less of people for not using the same style of punctuation and sentence-construction that I do.
I think your "likely accurate" guesses about who I am are probably wildly inaccurate, given that you've based them on a single 5-line post to a web forum. FWIW, I have no idea who you are, or what kind of person you are, except that you seem to be inclined to jump to conclusions based on scant evidence.
Someone who uses instruments properly and competently?¹
You have chosen different vibes: you have not just avoided some, you have embraced others. "Conformist" has not, historically, been used as a compliment.
Within epistemology, if researchers had put "group adherence" before "truth adherence", humanity - very loosely speaking - would still be using epicycles, ignore bacteria, use for the subatomic newtonian equations (which would not exist, because of course "distant action is unthinkable") etc.
So, here is one profile you could guess: someone who knows that distributions are bell curves instead of slopes - the extreme is less frequent than the median -, so someone who knows that "common sense" expresses a wish, when replacing the proper expression "good sense". So, someone who tries to carry on one's work objectively irregardless (and often in spite) of spurious fads and trends.
I hope it's not something like "[some] people are confused by numbers, so avoid numbers". Of course (special contexts aside), those people should fix their problem with numbers, and whenever numbers are useful or duly for the purpose of communication, they should be there. The same for punctuation or any other function.
They also use square brackets and curly braces more often than writers. That's not as amusing, for some reason.
It does feel like the semicolon doesn't deserve a position on home row anymore. I would demote it for a different letter or even the question mark. Actually I might try this on my Ergodox.
I find it interesting that I am using semicolons more these days because clients like my work Outlook recommend it in places I wouldn't use it but are correct; as a result, I use it more often.
What is the correct past tense of lead? I thought it was “led”, but I can’t remember having ever read any other form?
What often irks me, as a non-native speaker, is the wrong subjunctive (if that’s what it’s called). People say and write all the time “I wish you were there”, when they mean “I wish you had been there”. At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s supposed to be…
"I wish you were here." is grammatically correct in English. And yes it is the "subjunctive mood". Its meaning is closer to "I wish for you to be here" than "I wish you had been here".
This random page I found on the internet has a pretty decent explanation of the subjunctive:
It is "led". I notice the web using "lead" for both the present and past forms a lot--presumably because it sneaks past spelling checkers and autocorrect. (There's also a correspondence to "read" (long e) where "read" (short e) is also the past tense. Yeah, welcome to English.)
And, I'm almost sorry for pointing it out if you haven't noticed it. Once you do notice it, you see it everywhere and it's a big, jarring speedbump when you read.
"I wish you were here" -- in this location, now or in the past.
"I wish you were there" -- at another location, now or in the past.
"I wish you had been there" -- at another location, in the past.
"had been" means that the action is concluded. "were" is for both continuing and concluded actions, and more words are necessary to glark it from context.
"Were" is the subjunctive. I think it comes to English from the German subjunctive form "wäre". It's not the same word as "were", as in "We were running".
The example you've chosen refers to an event in the past, so "were" seems to be ambiguous in that context, because it could be "you were there", prefixed by I wish - i.e. the writer isn't trying to use the subjunctive at all, which I think is nowadays OK.
"I wish you were here" is a clearer example. That is clearly present subjunctive. "I wish you had been here" would be referring to an event in the past - so that's some kind of past subjunctive.
Present: "He leads me to believe in grammatical rigor."
Past: "She led me to that conclusion long ago."
Past, growing popular but historically incorrect: "She lead me to that conclusion long ago."
Noun: "I licked the sweet lead off the wall."
Also noun: "After six rounds of chess-boxing-sprinting, it was not clear to either of the participants who had the lead."
Also also popular but historically incorrect noun: "We have eighty thousand lead-free ornaments on this wall, each lit by an individually-addressable led."
Some would say that a focus on proper grammar, expansive incorporated linguistical repertoires, and western/anglo-centric style is not inclusive. And I would agree.
In line with your example, I have noticed "costed" used instead of "cost" increasingly often.
"costed" is proper when referring to the past action of determining the price for something to purchase. "Last week Sheila costed out the parts list, so it should be accurate."
"priced" is proper for both the past actions of determining the price of something to purchase or something to sell.
"Last week Sheila priced out the parts list, so it should be accurate."
"Last week Sheila priced everything on the shelves."
english is not esperanto. it happens to be the native language for a significant part of the world population, and they have no obligation to accept its bastardization for the sake of inclusivity.
in every non-western country with its own language, those "some" would get rightfully ridiculed.
What is this universal, pure English you've been speaking? I must have missed the tablets on which it was written?
Non jokingly: There is no "bastardization" of a natural language. It is spoken how it is spoken and insisting otherwise is missing the point of language (I suggest it is "communication"). There is no King of English to sit and dictate the rules except for the common languages spoken.
If you want to really grok the concept, take some time to figure out what a "language" actually is. I'll give you a hint: your first 5 definitions have obvious failings.
I don't agree that contemporary usage defines the language. We have a canon of English literature reaching back centuries, and people use phrases from e.g. Shakespeare without eveen noticing they're doing it. I think it would be a shame if learning contemporary usage should fail to equip you to read Shakespeare.
Descriptivism is all very well; but it doesn't seem to allow for any usage to be actually incorrect.
> The semicolon is an element of language that communicates stops, pauses, reflections, and cigarette breaks within a sentence. It connects loose ends with disparate ideas;
In this regard I think the decline of the semicolon is related to the fact that we write knowing that our message will be competing for attention in a busy inbox or feed. Our audience is the harried, harassed reader. There’s not much room for reflection or whimsy in such settings.
I love the semicolon, as a tool to judiciously include in the toolkit, for when you want to join two sentences more emphatically. It even helps you be concise and emphatic; this sentence demonstrates how.
I know you’re kidding but golly does comma misuse stop me in my tracks every time. I can slide past almost any other spelling or style error without a second thought, or even crazy autocorrect errors in which, say, the word “mother” has been replaced with “toaster”, but this sort of comma misuse is like nails on a chalkboard to me. And it’s rampant.
Ah, the colon. To misquote Denis Leary, never use a punctuation symbol named after part of your ass. And then the semicolon. Half-assed by name, half-assed by nature.
There are the rules, and then there is the intuitive rationale that a writer finds for using a certain grammatical form. The improved quality of writer’s writing is often premised upon these rationales. If the rationale is intuitive to the writer, it is likely that the reader’s cognitive overhead will be reduced as well. This contributes to a reader’s truly felt pleasure when they realize what they’re reading is good.
"Vonnegut’s First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. (From A Man Without a Country)" - https://lithub.com/kurt-vonneguts-greatest-writing-advice/
I might have this wrong but there was a definite use case for the semi-colon: it follows a colon in a list; can be used as a more flowing version of a bullet point list; can do so without interrupting the readers chain of thought.
edit: grammarly says I'm wrong and that should be a colon followed by a comma separated list. I might just be old or confused.
While some publications do add space on either side of an em-dash—including, apparently, the submitted website—I was always taught not to. It certainly isn't required.
I'm not super sure but you probably could've used one instead of the comma in your last sentence. I think people just use other symbols instead: comma, dash and period.
I think Germany does that as well. It was very confusing to inherit code that "accepted CSVs", but didn't accept files where the values were comma-separated.
Because we use the comma instead of the dot for decimal numbers. Since the advent of computers it's a bit less true, dots are used too but this is the historical reason.
I think kids have had "avoid run-on sentences" drummed into them so hard that they've become very hesitant to use alternative punctuation that would lengthen sentences.
"And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they’re going to get a C in my class" - David Foster Wallace
[1] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q?t=3m3s