There's a very funny piece entitled "
The Punctuation Hunter" on the "Unremitting Failure" blog. It concerns some people being cornered by a 48-point semicolon:
Game officials who finally got that
semi-colon said they never saw anything like it. Said it was like
something out of one of those extra-large-print books for old
people. I was like, no shit: I saw
the mother. With punctuation like that out there, you'd be safer
going to Africa to hunt exclamation marks. People see a
semi-colon, they laugh. Because a semi-colon looks
harmless. Well, go ask Charlie how harmless they are. Go
ask Charlie.
In other semicolon news, James J. Kilpatrick recently wrote a funny
diatribe against the "obnoxious" semicolon, calling it "sissy" punctuation:
It is not easy to write with dispassion
of the odious semicolon, but let me try: Except for its function in one
copy-editing circumstance, the semicolon is worthless. It is the
most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation ever
invented. Sensitive editors should abolish it forthwith.
Forthwith! [...] The semicolon is a belly-up guppie in a tank of
glorious Siamese fighting fish. It's girly. It is not just
probably the most useless of all forms of punctuation. It is
absolutely, positively the most useless of all such marks ever invented.
