Replace a semicolon with a greek question mark others
I sit at the table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or raisins out of the dish and eating them. They could exist as discrete sentences, and yet something would be lost if they were, an important cognitive rhythm.
Semicolons are useful when two thoughts are related, independent yet interdependent, and more or less equally weighted. I personally tend to use em dashes in many of these spots, but only when there is some degree of causality, with the clause after the em typically elaborating in some way on the clause before it, idiosyncratic wonkery I discussed in this essay. To paraphrase Edwin Starr, semicolons-and rules about semicolons-what are they good for?Īs we know, semicolons connect two independent clauses without a conjunction. It is an idea pervasive enough that I have had students in my writing classes ask about it: How do I feel about semicolons? They’d heard somewhere (as an aside, the paradoxical mark of any maxim’s influence and reach is anonymity, the loss of the original source) that they shouldn’t use them. What else might have demonstrated elitism in Vonnegut’s mind? Wearing slacks? Eating fish? Second, in an era of illiterate racist YouTube comments, to worry about semicolons seeming overly sophisticated would be splitting a hair that no longer exists.īut however serious Vonnegut was being, the idea that semicolons should be avoided has been fully absorbed into popular writing culture. But that is a bleak thought experiment unless you are such a fan of Ray Carver that you would like everyone to write like him.įinally, regarding the college part, two things: First, semicolon usage seems like an exceedingly low bar to set for pretentiousness. Inasmuch as it’s strictly true that you can make do with commas, the same argument that could be made of commas themselves in favor of the even unfussier ur-mark, the period. This obviously isn’t true-semicolons, like most punctuation, increase the range of tone and inflection at a writer’s disposal. My best guess is that he means semicolons perform no function that could not be performed by other punctuation, namely commas and periods. That said, I also have no idea what it means. The quote also, it seems, may have been taken out of context, as it is followed by several more sentences of puzzlingly offensive facetiousness, discussed here. To begin with the lowest-hanging fruit here-fruit that is actually scattered rotting on the ground-the “transvestite hermaphrodite” bit has not aged well. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. More on these rules later, but first the infamous quote in question: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. It would be difficult to come up with a sentence that would combine these words, but still worth keeping it in mind.Kurt Vonnegut’s caution against the use of semicolons is one of the most famous and canonical pieces of writing advice, an admonition that has become, so to speak, one of The Rules. Similarily, ψιλή, fine/thin, and ψηλή, tall are both pronounced psilei. For example the words λείπει, he/she/it is missing, λίπη, the fats and λύπη sorrow are all pronounced lipi. Some letters and letter combinations sound the same when spoken but have a completely different meaning when written. Some sounds are produced by the combination of two letters: These are the, ,
Here are a few challenging letters to pronounce: Others are completely different from the Latin ones though they might sound familiar: Some letters of the Greek alphabet are identical to Latin ones though some of them sound different: