The Noble Semicolon

There is this wonderful little punctuation mark known as the semicolon. It is my personal favorite punctuation mark and I protect its few functions as best I can. Here's the thing about the semicolon: using one correctly makes you look smart; using one incorrectly makes you look really stupid. Many people suffer from the delusion that using a semicolon - properly or not - makes you appear intelligent or perhaps scholarly. False. When I see a sentence punctuated like this one; I want to punch a watermelon.

Semicolons do NOT separate dependent clauses; commas can, as seen in the following sentence. Semicolons CAN separate independent clauses, as seen in the previous sentence. Semicolons are also useful in a list, if the items normally separated by a comma already contain commas. We visited London, England; Paris, France; and Rome, Italy.

Friends, stop using semicolons incorrectly. It makes you look like an idiot. If you don't know how to use one, don't. There are ways to survive without this glorious comma-and-colon-combination, though we all know I prefer to survive with it.

Love and Semicolons,

Leah Joy

If We Were a Movie...

Do you ever think about what the title of your life-movie would be? Here are some options for mine:

-Must Hate Dogs

-2 Days of Summer

-I Know What You Did Last Summer: And Boy, That was Boring

-Early to Bed, Early to Rise

-What Bassoonists Want

How about you?

Looking Back

I've been reading over my old journals recently, hoping to find scraps of inspiration for a song or something. Today, however, I found this amusing conversation I had with my little brother, who was 7 at the time:

Leah: What are you doing?

Jacob: Killing you.

Leah: What? No fair. I already died once today.

Jacob: You did??

Leah: What do you think, Jacob? I'm alive and talking to you.

Jacob: Um... yes?

Leah: Okay, I'm not Jesus, believe it or not.

Jacob: Well, obviously. If you were, you'd have been dead for three days!

Love and laughter,

Leah Joy