I don’t usually put my sermons on this blog, but I thought you might be interested in the election day sermon I preached yesterday. It’s now posted here, over on my sermon archive. If you want to lambaste me, you can do so right here, in the comments to this post.
Hey, and don’t forget to vote, OK?
Okay, just one question. I notice with interest a new kind of punctuation appearing in your writing. The colon followed by a dash to introduce a series. As in:
“The primary elections were full of unexpected plots twists:– Mitt Romney going down so quickly, John McCain campaigning so well and wrapping it up so early, the epic battle bewteen Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”
How come? One or the other (colon or dash) would be sufficient. Both together creates a little glyph that looks vaguely like a hypodermic needle. Which is, in its own way, kind of interesting. Just wondering what the origin is…
Love,
Your sister the English professor
Jean — This is actually common in 18th and 19th C. typesetting (and I’ve been doing lots of primary research in 18th and 19th C. sources recently). I’ve occasionally adopted it for online use, because a simple colon tends to disappear with smaller online type.
Other funky 18th and 19th C. punctuation conventions include:
comma followed by an en-dash (like this,– which looks a little strange, but can make sense in context)
a colon spaced equidistant between two words (a convention which makes good visual sense : as you can see here)
I’ve also become aware that 18th and 19th C. orthography was quite a bit more fluid than it is today.
Ah, thank you for the explanation! As for the fluidity of 21st century orthography? Next time you’re in Indiana, I’ll invite you to a writing workshop — lots and lots of fluidity, much inspired by internet usage!