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Sometimes a period provides too much pause between two sentences, but the comma doesn’t provide enough. Luckily, the period and the comma had a drunken one-night stand and produced this adorable little spawn they named the semicolon.
—Jenny Baranick, Kiss My Asterisk: A Feisty Guide to Punctuation and Grammar (2014), p. 37
A semicolon symbolizes continuance. Authors use the semicolon when they could’ve chosen to end a sentence but didn’t. The author is you and the sentence is your life.
—Project;
That most flirty of punctuation signs
Was needed, needled, on your wrist in ink:
A fay matchmaking copula who combines
Two unto one with a mischievous wink.
And may we glimpse a hungry pollywog
Who’s swimming up like sperm racing to ova
To find a bright future as prince or frog
With hopes like Dante’s for la vita nuova?
Or black moon reflected in rippling waters ~
Reminder that dark sublunar eclipses
Shall sometime dim your life of rock’n’rolling,
But when you’re waning … like fade-out ellipses,
Don’t despair: as Selene’s namesake votaress,
You’ll wax full again soon, hence ;
by Michael Winkelman
2020