Semicolons: One Small Mark of Awesomeness....
I didn't have any creative opening sentence, so I copied off the title.
With that random subject out of the way, let's turn our attentions to something less random yet awesome nonetheless. Semicolons have been a mark of grammatical fixation since 1600. They've also been a subject of insanity among literary novices and experts alike.
But its never been seen for how irreplaceable they are to our weird
English language.
Seriously, I'm no expert about semicolons, but I have a thing or two to say about just how awesome they truly are. I'm often asked the question, "Semicolons... is that small, or big? Because "semi-" means partial, right? But what about "semi", isn't that like, a really big truck? I mean, we've all seen 'Smokey and the Bandit', right? They drove their Trans-Am into the semi truck to escape Smokey, or whatever... And if its a semi colon, I mean, isn't that like a really big colon? Like, one that could ship a bunch of refrigerators to North Dakota, or something?"
In short: no, no, and no, I'm not familiar with that movie. But if there's one clear answer you need to hear, its this one. Take a sentence like this for example:
"The llamas wore pajamas and ate hamburgers with dogs and played Tic-Tac-Toe at the Senior Center and sang karaoke and took Lunesta and finally, went to sleep."
While the content of that sentence is pretty cool, doesn't something about it seem a little... off? It might be just me... or just you! Now, check out this revised sentence with... you guessed it... semicolons:
"The llamas wore pajamas; ate hamburgers with dogs; played Tic-Tac-Toe at the Senior Center; sang karaoke; took Lunesta; and finally, went to sleep."
... wasn't that just a breath of fresh grammatically correct air? Not to mention being all-around awesome!So next time you're in a literary jam, reintroduce yourself to the non-pointlessness of semicolons. Maybe you'll even learn to like each other... yeah, maybe not.
Sorry, semicolons, but we don't need you all the time.
Connectives are pretty sweet too!
