Freckles & Doubt (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2008-05-16 08:24 am
freckles_and_doubt) wrote2008-05-16 08:24 am
Entry tags:
transvestite hermaphrodites
The late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut apparently doesn't think much of semi-colons: they are, he says, "transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."
Oops. He has something resembling a point, in that one of the basic editing jobs I need to do on pretty much anything I write is to sneak through the wordy thickets with a shotgun, scientifically decimating the semi-colons as they peacefully roost amid the clauses. I seem to think naturally in semicolons, possibly because of a pathological need for balance: on the one hand, this, on the other, that. It is, as Vonnegut suggests, a vice to which the academic writer is particularly prone; its careful weightedness can, indeed, be pretentious.
On the other hand, while I try to cut down on the vice I don't think that it's valid to demand I give it up completely; I'm not sure I agree with him that semicolons are "transvestite hermaphrodites". In its shy, bashful way the semicolon is a valid little gidgit, unassumingly linking two clauses whose connection is too important to be disrupted by the solid, divisive thump of a full stop or the portentous pause of the colon. It's a coded deep breath, a neatly-encapsulated "also". It offers a useful alternative to the headlong rush of the comma so beloved by my reckless undergrads, whose tendency to gaily link strings of clauses with commas causes me active, green-inked pain. Shotgun and Kurt Vonnegut notwithstanding, I like semicolons and wish to pet them, like shy fluffy birds.
Grammatical musings aside, thank FSM it's Friday. I am glandular, headachy and tired, badly needing the weekend to collapse in: the week has been a nasty succession of days in which I wake up feeling OK, but become progressively more feeble and headachy as the day wears on, ending with helpless horizontality in front of the TV in the evenings. Alias Season 5 is only marginally helping, the bastards have just offed Vaughn. I like Vaughn - he was the first TV character crush I ever had that suggested I might be getting over the bad boy thing. Fortunately this is Alias, so I don't actually believe he's dead. Also, the blonde computer-geek replacement to pregnant!Sidney is annoying and unconvincing as a geek, she's clearly an airhead.
Oops. He has something resembling a point, in that one of the basic editing jobs I need to do on pretty much anything I write is to sneak through the wordy thickets with a shotgun, scientifically decimating the semi-colons as they peacefully roost amid the clauses. I seem to think naturally in semicolons, possibly because of a pathological need for balance: on the one hand, this, on the other, that. It is, as Vonnegut suggests, a vice to which the academic writer is particularly prone; its careful weightedness can, indeed, be pretentious.
On the other hand, while I try to cut down on the vice I don't think that it's valid to demand I give it up completely; I'm not sure I agree with him that semicolons are "transvestite hermaphrodites". In its shy, bashful way the semicolon is a valid little gidgit, unassumingly linking two clauses whose connection is too important to be disrupted by the solid, divisive thump of a full stop or the portentous pause of the colon. It's a coded deep breath, a neatly-encapsulated "also". It offers a useful alternative to the headlong rush of the comma so beloved by my reckless undergrads, whose tendency to gaily link strings of clauses with commas causes me active, green-inked pain. Shotgun and Kurt Vonnegut notwithstanding, I like semicolons and wish to pet them, like shy fluffy birds.
Grammatical musings aside, thank FSM it's Friday. I am glandular, headachy and tired, badly needing the weekend to collapse in: the week has been a nasty succession of days in which I wake up feeling OK, but become progressively more feeble and headachy as the day wears on, ending with helpless horizontality in front of the TV in the evenings. Alias Season 5 is only marginally helping, the bastards have just offed Vaughn. I like Vaughn - he was the first TV character crush I ever had that suggested I might be getting over the bad boy thing. Fortunately this is Alias, so I don't actually believe he's dead. Also, the blonde computer-geek replacement to pregnant!Sidney is annoying and unconvincing as a geek, she's clearly an airhead.