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January 23, 2007

Comments

Any fan of the em-dash and the comash should love Tristram Shandy, which would be about 30% shorter if you removed them. It is a veritable smorgasbord of well-employed punctuation.

And pie kills muffins dead.

muffins s/b cupcakes, but muffins too, I guess.

Gawd, I should just go to bed instead of leaving sycophantic comments all night.

GOODNIGHT.

No, please—leave all the sycophantic comments you like.

But I want to register my full support for the comma-dash, the semicolon-dash, the colon-dash, dashes of all sorts of lengths (consider Tristram Shandy), and all that.

So is this the sort of thing in the case of which a declaration is equivalent to the accomplishment of the goal, or is there perhaps some kind of official (or unofficial) body that you'll be reporting this to?

I was hoping someone could tell me, actually—is there a form I have to fill out?

You just have to start using it and ignoring all the pedantic assholes who try to tell you that it's bad grammar.

Btw, now I want pie.

Or donuts, actually. I really really really want some donuts.

I cross-post from CT:

Nicholson Baker had an essay that devoted considerable space to comashes and such beasts (IIRC an early Updike novel had a dash-comma). It was called "Survival of the Fittest" and was ostensibly a review of a book about punctuation in the New York Review of Books; in characteristic NYRB fashion the exotic punctuation marks that were most prominent in the essay were those that were not discussed in the book.

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