Guess what the most e-mailed article on the New York Times Web site is, as of this writing: "Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location." Read it, dear reader, read it now! First, the article includes such delightful quotes as “‘When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,’ Kurt Vonnegut once said. ‘Old age is more like a semicolon’” and this:
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Second, and more importantly, the article tells you about Neil Neches, a grammatically minded subway rider and my new hero:
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”
Third, you can read the article free of charge!
It's not often that the semicolon tops the list of the NYT most-emailed list. In fact, has any punctuation mark ever topped the NYT most-emailed list? Not to my knowledge. I feel like uncorking a bottle of bubbly to celebrate. I bet William Safire would.
Author's Note, February 21, 2008: In the excellent blog Language Log, Mark Liberman hazards a guess as to why the story topped the list:
But I suspect that the reason for the story's "most emailed" status is neither the public's interest in punctuation nor the eminence of the authorities quoted, but rather the correction added this morning:
Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee's deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a "lovely example" of proper punctuation. The title of the book is "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" — not "Eats Shoots & Leaves." (The subtitle of Ms. Truss's book is "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.")
So maybe I shouldn't uncork that bottle of bubbly afterall. Instead, maybe I should pour myself a shot of Jack, because I've been referring to Truss's book as Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (not Eats, Shoots & Leaves) for a while now, and I would like to drown my sorrows, thank you very much.
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