http://www.thefastertimes.com/nonsense/2012/08/31/are-you-there-google-its-me-mario/

Who else should we follow? Besides ourselves and each other?

Daniel Levin Becker has already blown away any prospect of winning. His quotation from the prologue of Moby-Dick is, as far as I’m concerned, the only sentence that needs a semicolon:

He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Mr. Becker is a dead-eye editor and writer. Follow him on twitter @dlb or find out more at www.dinnerlunchbreakfast.com

~Outdated Blatherings~

Gordon Ebenezer Gourd is single-handedly bringing back the semicolon, and he needs your help.

What he’s talking about:

Noble reader,

The semicolon has fallen out of favor.  Mr. Vonnegut said, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Indeed. They are neither comma nor period, and they tend to show up a lot in amateur writing.

Nowaday, many grammarians teach the semicolon as a band-aid for run-on sentences. If you hear a short pause in your head, not a long one, the teacher will tell you that’s a comma, but a comma is ungrammatical without a conjunction, and adding a conjunction upsets the rhythm of your thought, so you use a semicolon. Unfortunately, the reason that the amateur writer tends to write disjointed, run-on sentences is that he is not good at expressing the connections between his thoughts. And with the band-aid of the semicolon, he never will. His obscure logic remains obscured, only it’s even more rebarbative and off-putting, because now there’s a pretentious semicolon winking about it.

It’s hard to find a semicolon used well, but that’s no reason to abandon it. We simply need to use it better. A editor from the New York Times once called the semicolon “the agent of reflection and meditation.”  Because the a semicolon replaces connecting words, it can stand for  ”because,” “so,” “and,” “but,” or any other logical connection you can think of. It can even stand for illogical connections, or connections that are logical but as yet inexpressible, and therein lies the real value of the semicolon. The semicolon encourages contemplation because it forces us to intuit the connection ourselves. Maybe there’s no name for certain mental leaps.Now that’s deep.

By the way, I do not want to waste time with semicolons used to separate items in a list. That’s small change. Sure, if you think your list is too confusing, use semicolons instead of commas. No one is stopping you, Mr. Confusing List.

I will let you in on a little secret if you promise to keep it between us. The truth is that I,  Gordon Ebenezer Gourd, do not feel comfortable using the semicolon. It always feels off. Why can’t a simple period do? It can. In every case, in all cases, it can. Oh, I sprinkle in a few semicolons here and there so my critics won’t think I’m avoiding them, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t think any sentence ever requires a semicolon. You can achieve the very same effect with a period, I say,  if the sentences are in fact related. If they aren’t, then break to the next paragraph.

I, Gordon, do earnestly declaim: A semicolon is, more than anything else, a status symbol, a mere stress-mark which designates the two sentences it joins as deep, meaningful, and above all, leagues smarter than you, the puny little reader who cannot match me, the genius writer in smugness, arrogance, or condescension. A semicolon says, “What I have just said is really fucking brilliant.” It’s primary use is intimidation.

I yearn to be proven wrong. I yearn for nothing else.

The only way to redeem the semicolon is to find and celebrate the perfect model of semicolonnosity, of semicolonaciousness and semicolonoscopy – a sentence which would fall apart if it were not expressed in two independent parts and joined with a symbol that promises “these two parts are connected in a way that is clearest when left unsaid.”

Let us do this, you and I.

The contest will be run as follows. Post a sentence with a semicolon in it. There will be a prize for the best one. There will be a prize for the worst. You may also cast votes and share your philosophy – When do you use semicolons? However. This is not a democracy. I will determine who wins the swag.

Swag TBA. Suggestions welcome.

Cordially yrs,

Mr. Gourd