;-)

Please direct your attention to an article in the New York Times about the awesome power of a fully operational semicolon.

Read “Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location” for more about how Neil Neches, a writer for New York City Transit, has taken the Big Apple by storm by daring to correctly use a semicolon on a public service placard on the subway.

“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.”

If this tricky little piece of punctuation is your bag, you might also check out Craig Conley’s Abecedarian: Semicolon’s Dream Journal. It’s some serious semicolon stuff:

September 30, 2006
I dreamed of emoticons all night. At one point, I heard Noelle Cleary marveling, “Who would’ve thought we’d someday be expressing moods with colons, semicolons, and parentheses?” (just as she did in THE ART AND POWER OF BEING A LADY). Then I heard Nancy Kress saying that “Although the semicolon will never replace ‘I love you’ as a means of stirring readers’ feelings, punctuation nonetheless has a useful role to play in indicating emotion,” just as she discussed in WRITE GREAT FICTION.

The semicolon is so useful; if only people used it more.