Quote:
Originally Posted by varmint
i vaguely remember orwell writing an entire book without apostrophes, or maybe it was semi-colons. he thought they were an anachronism.
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Semi-colons sounds more appropriate. He was a British Modernist who praised clear, direct language - it only makes sense that he would disparage the semi-colon.
Kurt Vonnegut famously argued against semi-colons, stating that the only thing they're good for is proving you've been to college.
Personally, I love the semi-colon, because I love shades of meaning. We're in the postmodern era right now; there is no such thing as a clear, direct answer. The semi-colon provides a way to define sentence meaning that's somewhere between the directness of a period and the rambling ways of the em-dash and the comma. All hail the semi-colon!