Wednesday, December 6th, 2006
My head has been in LaTeX for the past week, typesetting my paper (if I'm lucky, by this time next year, I may have a finite Erdos number), so the only thing I seem to be able to think about apart from residuated categories, Lambek calculi, and partial generalized Galois logics is typography.
We all know that a colon is just two periods on top of each other, and a semicolon is just a period on top of a comma, but what if you put a comma on top of a period? That, my friends, is a hemicolon. And if you don't do it just halfway, and you get replace _both_ periods with commas, you have the opposite of a colon, otherwise known as an anticolon.
The only problem is that I don't know what they should be used for. There are zillions of mathematical symbols out there and there's always room for more, but I feel that these deserve a place in plain English writing. The semicolon is used when you want to take two complete sentences and mash them together in a single sentence. So instead of using a period, you mix it with a comma so that you get the sentence-continuing aspect of the comma and the complete-thought-ending aspect of the period. Perhaps the hemicolon should be use to punctuate sentence fragments, since they are really only partial thoughts that we've decided to treat like sentence. That sounds pretty good to me, but I still don't know what to do with the anticolon. Any suggestions?
Hm, I also think that there could be use for an exclamation semipoint (semibang?) and a question semimark that behave just like ! and ?, only they can be used for emphasis and questioning in the middle of a sentence, instead of at the end. Can anyone think of a better name for such punctuation marks?