Word: semicolons
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...Qualities For the past 40 years, the awkward Middle East press conference has helped define the job of Secretary of State. You go to Jerusalem or Ramallah; you stand there "guardedly optimistic" in public; in private, you try to move a comma, but the Israelis or Palestinians move a semicolon to block your comma. The result is almost always the same: gridlock. The breakthroughs, when they come, emanate from others. Walter Cronkite asks Anwar Sadat if he'd be willing to go to Jerusalem ... and Sadat, to everyone's surprise, says yes. The Israelis and Palestinians hold secret meetings...
...older, I remember the summer of 1998 for the moments spent scurrying to the nearest TV whenever Sosa or McGwire threatened the records of Ruth and Maris. That summer’s hardball fireworks happened to coincide with a brief hiccup that served as nothing more than a semicolon in a decade-long, run-on sentence of previously unimaginable financial growth. As I was 10 years old, it would be a stretch to claim that I was aware of the market’s rise that summer (whatever interest I could afford to the news was gobbled...
...students who lost their way in school," Ryan says. "They wanted something that I could help them get: an understanding of the basic elements of grammar, pronouns, those pesky apostrophes. The goal was to write an effective paragraph that was coherent and well supported. We aspired to the semicolon, but that rarely happened...
...with her title, which comes from a gag about a zoology entry on the panda), offers a lot of clear and helpful advice, and takes delightful detours into history. Example: her paean to Aldus Manutius the Elder, the 15th century Venetian printer who invented italics and first used the semicolon and whose babies, says Truss, she wishes she could have...
Humankind has not yet invented the right punctuation for Beyonce Knowles. No comma or period can contain her exuberant idiom; no semicolon can keep her from her meandering linguistic path. In the middle of her runaway sentences, Beyonce usually interrupts herself with deep, rolling spasms of laughter. Whether the subject is her tendency to forget lyrics while performing, her lack of time to devote to a boyfriend or her profound inability to play guitar, every utterance arrives with its own disruptive laugh track. Then there are the pauses--earnest, eyes-drifting-into-future-space jobs that can stretch...