Word: semicolonized
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...20th Century a whole tribe of scholars and interpreters have encamped on the slopes of the Bard, assaying his every semicolon. Their discoveries have made a gulf great & wide between the specialist's knowledge of Shakespeare and the ordinary reader's memory, in which the plays are likely to seem bombastical old standbys, crested here and there with great quotations. To distill the specialist's knowledge, to provide a lucid and sound account of what art may now be seen in every play, remained an important job for somebody...
...book explains further, is a "stand-in" for a noun; adjectives are "gossips" that "tell on" nouns and pronouns; a verb is the engine that makes the sentence go. Sentences have stop and go signals: a capital letter at the beginning is a green light; a dash, comma, semicolon or colon is a yellow light to make readers hesitate, a period, question mark or exclamation point is a red light. Suggested classroom game: a punctuation court for trying traffic violators: e.g.: "John Jones, you are charged with the serious offense of passing a period." Another game: a row of pupils...
...wish any other Mayor to do it if he wishes to stay in office. It has got to be done some way or another. We don't expect the local government to do it all. . . . We have developed a new kind of officeholder -'the semicolon boys...
...semicolon boys are simply a boil on the neck of this Administration, the fellows, you know, who have an office, and some law school has graduated them. They come here to get law jobs in the departments and then they sit down and look for semicolons and hold up the works...
Racketing across country by motorbus, nine English compatriots were patriotically keeping themselves to themselves until a sudden drivers' strike marooned them in a little town. For two days they waited, enduring their enforced semicolon, gradually revealing to each other the meaning of their unfinished sentences. Julian was a bachelor, suave, middleaged; John, a talented young artist, was his son, though unaware of the fact. They amused themselves by observing their fellow travellers: a Jewish salesman, a secretarial spinster, an amiable widow, two girl chums, a pair of honeymooners. One by one their travelling disguises were discarded. The spinster, frantically...