Ode to the semi-colon

[lobelia321]

Oh semi-colon, you most boring of punctuation marks! You're neither fish nor fowl: half full stop, half comma. You are necessary but oh, so boringly dutiful. I cannot abide the types of sentences that need you but now and again even I must have recourse to your pedestrian self. Not for you the definite forcefulness of a full stop (or 'period', I guess, as the Americans would have it). The full stop is the Norrington of punctuation marks! And not for you the graceful sweetness of the comma, all curvaceous elegance. Nor for you the open-ness of the colon, the breathlessness of the double-hyphen, the heartstop of the exclamation mark, the dreaminess of the ellipsis, nor even the embrace of the parentheses.

You're like a pair of false teeth: useful but with no bite.

;