Bravo, huzzah, and pip pip! I love it. It’s (contraction) not only good for separating related groups in a comma-connected string of words but also a sort of half-breath if one were speaking instead of writing. Not a period whole-breath or a comma slight pause, but, just like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right.

But I was exposed to Tristram Shandy at an impressionable age.

I really like your blog. I just became aware of it yesterday. Like your picture, too. Always liked Magritte. Symbolic and wildly fanciful at the same time.

Your blog really is a treat. I have it set up to “feed” automatically to my home page. A treat because people so often don’t know what they’re doing anymore and so do what they do that much more earnestly. I just read a post where a person said that the NYT had been hung up by its (no apostrophe) own petard. Apparently hearing the “hoist” in the phrase the writer assumed that a petard was some kind of crane or winch and used a cable to lift things.

I knew a fellow in New Orleans who got a lot of things like that wrong, but he also couldn’t spell his own name. Intelligent fellow, quite savvy, but just couldn’t read. Once I asked him something and he replied, “mo debbly!” Once somebody said “most definitely” and he heard it a little differently and having no way to check he just said what he heard. On him it fit in with his sort of benevolent highwayman personna, but it’s a little dismaying when somebody writing for lots of pay makes a mistake like that and nobody catches it, which happens a lot now.

So good for you. There are probably fewer college seniors who know about the no-apostrophe-for-the-possessive-it than can walk to an unlabeled map and point to the Caspian Sea.

A practice I developed some years ago while writing engineering specifications was to carefully use commas, colons and sem-colons. This allowed the specification to be written in human-readable English, yet parsable with Perl when being slurped into a database. For instance: “Yada: a) yada, b) blah, c) etc.”, was a single requirement. Alternately, “Yada: a) yada; b) blah; c) etc.” is parsed to three separate requirements: concatenating the preface with each list item separately.

I also found that between schedule demands and working with a team of people each with different writing styles, it’s difficult to produce a specification that conforms to a single syntactical and prose standard. This forces us to KISS, and write requirements that don’t contain embedded lists. Just short and sweet “The thing shall meet the performance shown in Table 3.2.2″.

I think the sem-colon is used less because our whole reading experience has changed. We read short ephemeral writings on a computer screen. Proper use of a semi-colon creates sophisticated prose that doesn’t fit well with the digital age. Our lives are in a hurry: we don’t have or won’t make the time to acquire and appreciate the nuances that semi-colons draw out. If this keeps up, we’ll all be writing and speaking Globish.

Washington DC seems to have more than its fair share of speakers who use “myself” neither reflexively nor intensively but in place of a subject pronoun; e.g. John and myself are hosting the party.

Q2600, I wonder if that’s a colloquialism unique to your region. In my area, we say “The house needs painting”, but that’s grammatically correct.

I uncoiled the rope from my waist (Always carry a length of rope; it’s the most useful thing in the world.) and…

Love it. My thinking is so often parenthetical in pattern – loops and loops of ideas, non-linear and probably confusing from the outside – that loads of parens and phrases set off by dashes are my only available strategy.