Why punctuation matters

A panda walks into a restaurant and takes a table. The waiter thinks it's a bit odd, a panda walking into a restaurant , but he approaches it nonetheless. The panda grabs a menu, opens it, and points to a cheeseburger. The panda gets his cheeseburger, savors every bite, even wipes its mouth with a napkin. Then the panda pulls out a gun and shoots every person in the restaurant. Everyone except for the waiter. Soaked in blood, he can only ask the panda, "Why?" The panda pulls out an encyclopedia. It flips the book to the P section, places…

In defense of the semi-colon

The semicolon is a tiny slice of unbridled awesome. Columnist Moira Redmond agrees, as outlined in this fun Slate column I stumbled across. As my departed-much-too-soon friend Frank Lauro once said, "You can have my semicolon when you tear it from my cold, dead hands."